Wānaka Genealogical Group

09/10/2026

27/09/2026

⛵ In 1848 two small ships carried a church across the world and built a second Edinburgh at the bottom of it. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The John Wickliffe anchored at Port Chalmers on the twenty third of March with ninety seven passengers and William Cargill aboard. The Philip Laing followed on the fifteenth of April with two hundred and forty seven more and the Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet. They had been sent by the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland, which had split from the established church five years earlier and wanted somewhere to begin again on its own terms.

The settlement was to be called New Edinburgh. They named it Dunedin instead, from Dùn Èideann, the Gaelic for the city they had left.

From that harbour the names spread out across the map. Mosgiel took its name from Mossgiel in Ayrshire, the farm Robert Burns worked. Balclutha means the town on the Clutha, and the Clutha is the Clyde. Invercargill, away in Southland, was named for Cargill himself.

Not all of it was Free Kirk and not all of it was Scottish. Only about two thirds of those first settlers belonged to the church that sent them, and Waikouaiti had been a whaling station with farming families since 1840, eight years before the ships came. Lawrence and the inland goldfields came later, with the rush of 1861.

But the accent stuck. It is still there today, in a city with a Robert Burns statue in its centre.

They did not name it after the old place out of homesickness. They named it that because they meant to build it. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

23/09/2026

Between 1852 and 1857, around five thousand Highlanders were shipped to Australia by a charity set up to remove them. 🚢

The potato blight that devastated Ireland also hit the Highlands and Islands, and by the early 1850s whole districts of Skye, Harris, North and South Uist, Barra and Mull were destitute. The answer arrived in the form of the Highland and Island Emigration Society, founded in 1852 with respectable patrons and genuine subscriptions.

It paid the passage. Landlords contributed toward their own tenants leaving, which tells you plainly that relief and clearance were doing the same work. Families were assembled at Birkenhead or Southampton, sailed for Melbourne, Geelong, Sydney and Adelaide, and arrived in a colony crying out for shepherds and servants at exactly the moment the gold rushes had emptied the stations of labour.

What makes this different from almost every other emigration story is the paperwork. The Society kept a register, and it survives. It lists families by name, with ages, the island or parish they came from, the ship, and remarks written by officials about their character and their circumstances. If your people went out this way, they are not a silhouette on a quay. They are a line of ink with a township attached.

Many of them went straight into the bush as shepherds, which was work they already knew, on a scale they could not have imagined. Gaelic was spoken in the Western District of Victoria within a decade.

They were called paupers when they boarded. Within a generation their children owned land, which was the one thing none of them could ever have had at home. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

07/09/2026

There is a city at the bottom of the world whose name is simply Edinburgh, said in Gaelic. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Dunedin, on the south east coast of New Zealand's South Island, is Dun Eideann. It was founded in 1848 as a deliberate Scottish settlement, and not by accident or by drift. The Free Church of Scotland, born out of the Disruption of 1843 when hundreds of ministers walked out of the established Church rather than accept patronage, decided to build a Presbyterian colony from scratch at the other end of the earth.

The first two ships, the John Wickliffe and the Philip Laing, arrived in the autumn and spring of 1848 carrying around three hundred and fifty settlers into a long green harbour surrounded by steep bush. Leading them were Captain William Cargill, a Peninsular War veteran in his sixties, and the Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of Robert Burns. They came off the boats into mud and rain and started laying out streets named Princes and George and Hanover, because that is what you do.

They were serious people with serious intentions. Within a generation Dunedin had a university, the first in New Zealand, founded in 1869. It had schools, a newspaper, churches and a hard working Presbyterian conscience. Then in 1861 gold was found in Central Otago, the population exploded, and for a while Dunedin was the largest and richest city in the country. ⛏️

Walk it now and it is startling. Neo Gothic stone, a statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the Octagon, street names lifted straight off an Edinburgh map, and the largest kilted pipe bands outside Scotland. There are Otago families whose Scottish ancestry is not sentimental at all. It is simply what they are.

They sailed sixteen thousand miles from a country that had made life impossible for them, and the first thing they did on landing was build another Edinburgh. 🪻

02/09/2026

Tips for Family History Reunions:

Family history reunions can be fun and meaningful events that bring relatives together and provide an opportunity to share family history information with each other.

This article by Janet Hovorka (https://education.myheritage.com/article/5-tips-for-hosting-a-fantastic-family-reunion/) features five practical tips for planning and holding a successful event, including recipe sharing, family skills and talents, storytelling, and more.

To learn more about family history reunions, check out Goal 3 in Project 6: Help (https://www.thefhguide.com/project-6-help03.html ).

01/09/2026

Did someone in your family serve in the Merchant Navy? Here's how you can trace them in the surviving crew lists ⚓

31/08/2026

28/08/2026

Are you researching your ancestors from Canterbury and the West Coast? Archives New Zealand in Ōtautahi have added a lot of new records to Collections search, and also enhanced the accessibility of some existing records. They include:

- Employees' dead service cards from Ministry of Works in Kaikoura,1921-1978
https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search #/entity/aims-archive/29124/kaikoura-ministry-of-works-dead-service-cards-

(The rather morbid sounding “dead service cards” is a term meaning they were no longer employed with the department.)

- Court records from local Magistrate’s Courts, which can include court summonses and witness statements, 1881-1925
https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search #/entity/aims-archive/18597/little-river-magistrates-court-criminal-files

- Immigration records documenting applications for subsidised immigration from Britain to New Zealand, 1963-1975 https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search #/entity/aims-archive/29121/department-of-labour---immigration---nominal-index-cards

- Immigration records documenting temporary permits to enter New Zealand, 1927-1970 https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search #/entity/aims-archive/28948/temporary-permits-to-enter-new-zealand

- Certificates of Registration granting immigrants re-entry into New Zealand, 1881-1980 https://collections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena/search #/entity/aims-archive/28620

Immigration records can include details such as date of birth or age, place of birth, place of residence, fingerprints, and a photograph.

We are also listing patient files, including patient files from Hanmer's Queen Mary Hospital and a surviving sample of Christchurch Public Hospital patient files. Contact Ask an Archivist for more information. https://www.archives.govt.nz/about-us/services-we-offer/ask-an-archivist

26/08/2026

Have you used Trove to research your family’s story this Family History Month?

Trove is an incredible resource for uncovering information about your ancestors. Explore a wealth of knowledge through digitised newspapers, photographs, letters, diaries and more!

Start exploring Trove: https://brnw.ch/21x5bem

If you have used Trove to explore your family's story, we’d love to hear about it. Share your findings by submitting a Trove Story: https://brnw.ch/21x5bel

[Image description: Newspaper article titled ‘Wedding’ with a picture of a smiling bride in a white lace gown, holding a bouquet of carnations and frangipanis.]