No Internet for this research
By YVONNE AIREY
HuttNews | Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Super Sleuths: Hutt Valley genealogy club members, from left, Marie Perham, Joy Adams and Jan Walker, together with Helen Hinton, have received coveted branch awards for their many years of dedication in transcribing local records to help other researchers.
With the proliferation of family history sites on the internet, genealogists and family historians in the 21st century have never had it so good.
But go back even two decades and wading through records, often in hardly legible hand and certainly with no indexes to take you straight to your name, was long, laborious and painstaking.
When the Hutt Valley branch of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists was formed 28 years ago, a dedicated group set out to troll through Hutt Valley school record books, gravestone inscriptions, council archives and further afield into such repositories as National Archives in Wellington, seeking local information to make all this more readily available to NZSG researchers everywhere.
Marie Perham, Joy Adams, Jan Walker and Helen Hinton were four of the most dedicated of these and their work forms the basis of the HV branch record collection now housed at the Petone Heritage Centre in Britannia Street.
Their dedication to detail was acknowledged at the recent branch annual meeting and they were later each presented with a branch certificate of appreciation.
They have fond memories of wading through dusty volumes, seeking out lost copies, down on hands and knees with brush and pen at graveyards and a decade of travel to Wellington to the archives together.
Branch members also help out at the Petone Library between l0am and noon on the first and fourth Wednesdays and the first Saturday of every month.
Combined with the Hutt City's Heritage collection, there is a wealth of local information on hand for researchers.
The next big event on the calendar is Family History Month in August, with a full programme of events planned throughout the region.
The Hutt Valley Branch meets at the Petone Community Centre, 7-11 Britannia Street monthly, apart from January, at 7.30pm on the second Thursday of the month and at 10am on the third Thursday of the month. For further information visit the website at huttvalleygenealogy.org.nz or email the secretary on [email protected].
