Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Some of my family history – the gravestone of John and Priscilla Yeatman

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Family history sells. Websites designed to help you track your rellies or discover your Highland origins net millions in revenue each year. New Zealanders have embraced the search for their family’s past. We do the tours of the castles overseas; we walk the little lanes where ‘our settlers’ lived. We’ve got on board the genealogical bandwagon with a vengeance.

A couple of weeks ago I spent my sabbatical uncovering ways the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) can best carry out birth, death and marriage research for our newest biographies. We’ve discovered that the hardest part is bypassing privacy restrictions on recently living people – and those who fit within our current area of research and interest are people who died in the last decade or so. But online resources, such as the website of the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom, can now make our search easier

Every week we get numerous enquiries from genealogists who want to make use of our biographical database. Researchers compiled the database at the time the first DNZB biographies were written. Today it’s still a great source of background information on about 13,000 New Zealanders.

The National Library of New Zealand runs a family history centre, which gives access to a treasure trove of tools to help you uncover your roots. During my stint there, I was surrounded by other enthusiasts.

Using computerised databases has supplanted spending hours in front of the microfiche reader; but many of the fiche records are still valuable. At the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Family History Centre in Hataitai, Wellington, I put the fiche to a test. I knew my great-great-great grandfather James Spence had got off a ship from Glasgow at Port Chalmers, Otago, in 1868. Scottish Parochial Registers, held on microfiche, quickly put together a picture of James’s parents and grandparents. They conveniently hadn’t moved far from the village outside Glasgow that they and their antecedents had lived in for about the previous 300 years. Archives New Zealand also holds a wealth of material for those who want to track the ships their Anglo rellies arrived on. I could now see why family historians get addicted.

You’ll often hear older Pākehā New Zealanders refer to themselves as Scottish, Irish or French. They are, of course, referring to their family history. I’ve always found this tricky – I consider myself a Kiwi; I was born here and this place is my heritage. I know I’ve got a bunch of long-dead relatives who were born in Glasgow and Stoke Wake and Hull and Jersey and Swansea, but I don’t feel one bit Scottish, Welsh or English.

Though recently I found that two of my English relatives, John and Priscilla Yeatman – who arrived here in 1875 under the Vogel scheme for assisted immigrants – are buried at Greendale Public Cemetery near Darfield in mid-Canterbury. I was in Christchurch last weekend, and my Kiwiness didn’t stop me making a little visit to pay my respects.

SpongeBob Tarau Porowhā

He aha te ōritetanga o SpongeBob, Trade Me me te tangata i wikitoria mō te kanikani me ngā whetū? Kei te tautoko tonu i te wiki o te reo Māori. Ko SpongeBob Tarau Porowhā kua whakamāoritia, ā, ka kitea i te wiki nei i runga i a Nickelodeon. Ko tā Trade Me, kua whakamāori i ngā kupu i raro i a Kevin te Kiwi. Arā, Ko Te Papa Hokohoko ā Ngā Kiwi. I te ata nei, te toa o kanikani me ngā whetū a Tāmati Coffey, kaipānui tohu o tāwhirimātea, ka pānui i ngā ingoa wāhi me ngā rā o te wiki i roto i te reo Māori i runga i te hōtaka Parakuihi.

Tamati Coffey (nō Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori te whakaahua)

Ko ēnei āhutanga he tohu kua paingia te reo Māori e te hapori. Ka tika hoki, nā te mea, ko te kaupapa o te wiki nei, ko te reo i te hapori.

Kei te Manatū Taonga kua tautoko anō i te reo. Kei Te Ara, kua whakamāoritia ngā urunga kaupapa Māori. Kei NZHistory.net ngā kupu kotahi rau o te reo Māori. Kei ngā tāngata taumata rau, arā te DNZB, kua whakamāoritia te katoa o ngā haurongo Māori. Mō ngā kaupapa o te Wiki o te reo Māori, tirohia NZLive.com.

Kei roto hoki te reo Pākehā tēnei Rātaki (This blog post is also available in English)

SpongeBob Tarau Porowhā – SpongeBob Square Pants

What do SpongeBob Square Pants, Trade Me and Tamati Coffey, winner of ‘Dancing with the stars’, all have in common? They’re all supporting Māori language week. SpongeBob cartoons in Māori will be showing on Nickelodeon all week. Trade Me has changed ‘Where Kiwis Buy and Sell’ under Kevin the Kiwi into the Māori phrase ‘Te Papa Hokohoko ā ngā Kiwi’. And on Breakfast this morning, I noticed that Tamati Coffey, winner of ‘Dancing with the stars’, had the days of the week and place names of New Zealand translated into Māori for the weather.

Tamati Coffey (photo courtesy of the Māori Language Commission)

These are all signs that Māori language week has entered into aspects of our popular culture. This is timely as the theme of Māori language week this year is Te reo i te hapori, Māori language in the community.

At the Ministry for Culture and Heritage we’ve been doing our bit for Māori language. Te Ara has translated Māori focused content into te reo. On NZHistory.net you can see features on Māori language week, 100 Maori words every New Zealander should know and history of the Māori language. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography has translated into Māori all biographies of Māori personalities. For what to do during Māori language week check out NZLive.com.

This blog post is also available in Māori (Kei roto hoki i te reo Māori te Rātaki nei)

Montana Poetry Day

Today is New Zealand’s annual poetry day. In celebration I wanted to share a couple of my favourite poems on Te Ara.

In our Wanganui entry you can read one of James K. Baxter’s wonderful Jerusalem Sonnets: ‘Poem for Colin–25‘, in which he personifies the Whanganui River as a taniwha.

And in our entry on introduced land birds you can read Denis Glover’s wonderful tragedy in poetic form, ‘The magpies‘. And you no longer have to imagine the ‘quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle’ of the magpies – it’s accompanied by a sound file of magpies quardle oodle ardle wardle doodling.

There’s lots of poetry-related events going on today around the country – for more information visit NZLive.com, or the official Montana Poetry Day site.

Conference participant, public law specialist Mai Chen

I have just returned from the most stimulating conference of my life. It was the Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas conference held in Auckland over the past weekend. There were about 350 people there, mostly Chinese New Zealanders who had come to talk about and celebrate their New Zealand story. There was some history, with a magisterial address by James Ng on the discrimination suffered by the Chinese here, but for me it was the fascinating stories of contemporary New Zealand Chinese that were truly inspiring.

In one session entitled ‘High Flying Bananas’ four New Zealand Chinese told their stories of achievement in modern New Zealand. Mai Chen’s story began when she landed in Christchurch aged six. It was such an unwelcoming environment that on her first day, the sight of Mai and her three sisters walking together along the street to the botanic gardens led an astonished passing motorist to drive into the car in front which in turn bashed the next car. From that point Mai decided that discrimination would make her more determined; and she learned not to conform, but to treasure her difference, and make it count for her. As one of the country’s leading public law specialists the strategy has clearly worked.

Next up Don Ha described himself as very different from Mai – ‘neither good looking and without a university degree in sight’. Yet he is now one of Manukau’s most successful realtors and clearly a very rich man indeed. He arrived as a Chinese boy from Vietnam and spent his first few months in New Zealand in a refugee camp. He quickly learned how to survive in Auckland. One of his jobs was collecting watercress from the drains around Auckland, packaging it up and selling it to the New World supermarket. He earned $300 a week – which was fine until the council closed off the supply by spraying all the drains! He sold cars, had a stall in a flea market, worked in a bakery, and eventually set up his own real estate firm. He sold 86 houses in his first year – 98% of them to Pākehā buyers. Now he lives in a mansion where his bedroom is larger than his first house, buys race horses and sponsors the local rugby club.

If rags to riches was not your taste, then the session ‘Visually Chinese’ was certain to inspire. Five artists talked about how their Chinese experiences in New Zealand had shaped their art work. They ranged from street artist Peap Tarr, to brilliant architect Ron Sang, to graphic artist Liyen Chong – who drew using human hair. I especially liked the work of Susan Louie. Brought up on a market garden outside Gisborne, she now fashions in glass the vegetables her family grew in the fields.

And for us webbies there was also something. I tried, until the technology failed(!), to show off Te Ara’s immigrant stories, especially the wonderful piece on the Chinese by one of the conference organisers, Manying Ip. And the New Zealand Chinese Association and Auckland City Libraries launched their fabulous new site, Chinese Digital Community. This is a wholly community-built site, and the local Chinese have responded magnificently by uploading their precious images and telling their stories. Check it out.

At the banquet the former boss of New Zealand Post and new boss of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade, John Allen, spoke of how New Zealand needed Chinese New Zealanders precisely because their difference of perspective was a source of innovation and creativity. If the sheer exuberance and imagination on show at the conference is any guide, then New Zealand has a great future.