He aha kua whakamatihikotia
What's been digitised
We’ve digitised hundreds of thousands of records, so you can view them online. See some interesting records we’ve digitised recently.
Know before you start
Many of the links on this page are to whole series in Collections search. Series are groups of records on a similar topic.
To see the individual records that make up a series:
use the links to open the series page in Collections search
expand the Record hierarchy drop-down menu at the bottom of the page.
Crown Purchase Deeds – Series 8102
Crown Purchase Deeds document land bought from Māori and other owners by the Crown. Called “a hundred little treaties” by historian Jared Davidson, they’re important as historical artefacts and for the light they shine on the shifting relationship between tangata whenua and the Crown through the nineteenth century.
In 2020 these archives were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register for Aotearoa New Zealand.
Visit UNESCO to learn more about the Crown Purchase Deeds
Deed contents
We’ve digitised more than 6,000 Deeds, covering agreements from all over Aotearoa New Zealand. They mostly date from 1841-1905, but also include some earlier records. In general, each Deed includes:
legal and physical descriptions of the land that was sold
maps or plans (these can be on or separate to the actual Deed)
conditions of sale
the sale price
names and tohu of tūpuna (sometimes with hapū affiliation noted)
records of payment
an English translation, if the original Deed was written in te reo Māori
related papers, like Crown Grants or Māori Land Court Orders.
View Crown Purchase Deeds (Series 8102) – Collections search
Lantern slides – Series 28102
This series of photographic slides contains images used to promote Aotearoa to international tourists from 1890 to around 1910. Transferred to us by the New Zealand High Commission in Ottawa, Canada, they put the country’s natural beauty and culture on display. You’ll find images of mountains, forests, thermal activity, waterfalls, glaciers and caves, as well as Māori people and artworks.
Māori (native) school records - various series
We’ve digitised some of the records from Māori schools (previously called Native schools) that we hold in our Auckland archive. Most were transferred to us by the Northern Regional Office of the Department of Education.
As well as being important witnesses to the attitudes of those who ran and oversaw the schools, and their relationships with their students and communities, these records can be very useful if you’re trying to trace tūpuna or other historic people. They contain many registers of names that can help you discover where someone lived and went to school.
Read our guide to finding and using school records
Useful series
Registers of Admission, Progress and Withdrawal [Series 1004]
Registers of Attendance [Series 1006]
Examination Registers [Series 1007]
Registers of Progress and Achievement [Series 1011]
Attendance returns can be found in the Registered Subject files [Series 1001]
Statutory Branch Maps – Series 977
This series contains around 2000 maps that were owned by the Statutory Branch of the Department of Survey and Land Information, and agencies that preceded it. The maps date from 1840 - 1976, and range in size from 20cm2 to over 5 metres long.
Interesting archives in this series
Many of these maps open fascinating windows into history – like R22822513, in which a blue line marks land south of Auckland confiscated from Māori by the Crown in December 1864, near the end of the two-year Waikato War.
View R22822513 in Collections search
A topographical map of Tauranga that also shows confiscated lands, meanwhile, is interesting for its author. R22823650 was drawn by William Gundry – a surveyor and interpreter for the Crown, whose father was the European William Richardson Gundry, and whose mother was Margaret Rautangi of Ngai Tupoto. Gundry’s name appears in records of New Zealand wars throughout the 1860s and 70s.
Samoan Land Deeds – Series 18962
We collaborated with Digital Pasifik to digitise 5 volumes of Sāmoan land deeds. They volumes contain handwritten transcriptions of land sales from 1856 - 1915 that were registered with the British Consul.
Why we digitised these records
These books were in constant demand, but are very fragile – much of the paper is breaking down. Before digitisation made them available online, researchers needed to travel to our Wellington archive to view poor-quality microfilm copies. Now, they can be viewed from anywhere in the world. The day Digital Pasifik announced these records were available was the biggest on their site to date.
View Series 18962 in Collections search
