Fact-diggers mine for council gold
Hutt News | Tuesday, 06 March 2001
2001 International Year of Volunteers
Throughout 2001 - International Year of Volunteers - Hutt Views is running a series of articles highlighting the unpaid work thousands of people do in Hutt City. In this article, we look at how genealogists help make Hutt City Information more accessible.
HAPPY IN THEIR WORK: (left to right) Len Dangerfield, Iris Fraser, Molly Geeves, Marie Perham, Jan Walker, Joy Adams, Betty Dangerfield and Helen Hinton create indexes from council records.
THEY chat quietly among themselves while they work, eyes and expressions concentrating on the job at hand. Occasionally one of them will joke with a lively yet gentle humour that provokes similar, witty rejoinders. Yet the work carries on with a ferocious devotion to accuracy.
They're members of the Hutt Valley branch of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists who volunteer every Monday morning to help Hutt City Council archivist Ruth Robinson make old council records more accessible to people.
Old, huge, heavy books about permits and jobs done by builders, plumbers and drainlayers are patiently transferred to index cards, an interim step to putting everything on computer.
Last year the Department of Internal Affairs reported that more than a million New Zealanders did volunteer work. The United Nations designated 2001 the International Year of Volunteers, which opened in New Zealand on December 5.
"It's a mutually supportive relationship," Ms Robinson says. "The volunteers provide huge support for the archives, they're very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do, and it helps having such good advocates for the City Archive, too. And they're great company".
Helen Hinton, at 68 the youngest of the group, says that as genealogists they see the benefits of having access m information that is stored somewhere, "and of making it accessible to people and keeping it accessible".
Through this work Jan Walker found out who had built her parents' fowlhouse, a remark that sparks observations about social change, and that now they are banned under bylaws.
Marie Perham, nearly 50 years ago the pipe major of the Auckland Ladies' Highland Pipe Band, found that her son's house was built as a two-bedroom cottage in 1929.
The reference to her bagpipe-playing leads to a brief discussion of whether it should be "ladies" with an apostrophe or ladies without one. Len Dangerfield, at 82 the oldest in the group, and the lone male, is quite clear that it shouldn't. A retired newspaper compositor, he quotes the Cambridge University manual of style as his authority. "The ladies don't own the band," he says.
Elderly and retired, they're active. Six of them have personal computers, and four are on the internet. They send each other and Ruth Robinson emails, including the joke ones. The internet, following on from the microfiche and microfilm, has opened vast new areas in which genealogists can fossick around.
Jan Walker, helped by Helen Hinton, tutors older people in computers at SeniorNet in the Betty Campbell Centre in Wellington.
"I've lost my Norton Antivirus," Mrs Perham says, which prompts a brief discussion on where it might have gone and how and where it might be found.
Several of the group are volunteers in other activities, and most engage in sports such as bowling. Iris Fraser, who has lived in Wainuiomata for 40 years, is a member of the Historical Society of Wainuiomata.
By common, unspoken consent, the over-the-teacups interview starts to draw to a close. After a long summer break, they're keen to get back into digging facts out of the volumes of council files.
Back at their desks they get back to work - their handwriting is neat and clear, spelling correct.
