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Register Room Introduction
Archives New Zealand Wellington

The Register Room contains New Zealand's Historical and 
Genealogical Frontier in the form of indexes to correspondence 
from Government employees and the New Zealand Public. An estimate 
suggests that more than 500,000 letters, written between 1840 
and 1913, are "registered" in the volumes contained in this room.

For each letter the following information was recorded:
Name and residence of writer, the date the letter was written and
received, the subject of the letter and references to previous and
future correspondence.

The Archives NZ "Guide to the Register Room" provides essential
introductory material. An article titled "Letters written to the 
New Zealand Government 10th June 1886" illustrates how to use 
the registers through the use of examples and was published in the 
GRINZ Yearbook 2000.

The registers in this room are searchable by NAME, SUBJECT, 
DATE and PLACE.

Government Departments Represented

Each letter is given a number (starting at No. 1 at the
beginning of each year) and entered into a register. 

The Registers are indexed by NAME and SUBJECT (termed "nominal" 
and "departmental" indexes respectively). Name indexes are in the form 
of all the A's, B's, C's being listed together for each year. They are 
not in alphabetical order within the letter.

The Registers record letters in order of the date received thus
making a search by DATE possible.

The history of a PLACE over a specified period can be
gleaned by looking for letters written by people who lived there.


Information from the Register Room found on this site
Names of people found in "inwards correspondence" are mostly 
indexed into this site. On occasions a link will take the reader 
straight to a partial transcript of an archive. Use the keyword search 
function of your browser to locate the surname of the person in the 
file.

All dates, unless otherwise specified, refer to when the letter
was written. The name and residence of the author are followed
by the subject content of the letter as written in the Register.

The word ORDER means that the "archive" can be requested through 
the computer system using the reference cited. There will be 
times when the archive will not have survived. A precis of the 
original letter may be found in the Outwards Letterbooks.

The use of the word WITH indicates that the letter referred
to was included with future correspondence. For example
(1858/1129 with 1858/1248) indicates that letter 1129 was placed 
with letter 1248. The final reference for ordering purposes will 
be the letter without a forward reference. Theoretically the 
archive should contain all the previous letters as referred to in 
the Register.

A Special Note: The "Register System" is only a guide to
the correspondence - the archives themselves almost always 
contain more information than that indicated in the register.
So be prepared for surprises.

Finally when following up references at Archives NZ please
assist the staff at the reference desk by mentioning this site or
by providing copies of the material from this site. This will
make their job much easier. If errors have been made please
contact the author at d.chambers@paradise.net.nz and they will
be corrected.