Digital Newspapers from New Zealand

If you happen to have relatives from New Zealand, the nation southeast of Australia, you are in luck.  There are more than one million pages of digitized New Zealand newspapers and periodicals in a collection which covers the years 1839 to 1945 from 63 publications from all regions of New Zealand. There are additional newspapers covering further years placed on the site every few months. Over 23 million articles alone are presently in the collection.

From the National Library of New Zealand an at home method to view and research old newspapers from New Zealand.  The site allows you to search by dates, locations, names of newspapers or topics.

When searching by regions, a map is provided going from Northland to Gisborne, Manawatu, to Wellington, to West Coast and Otago.  Clicking on any region shows the newspapers available in the section and the years covered.

In the title search it is of the newspaper titles where an alphabetical listing is provided. Using the date search, a day, month and year can be selected.  Any selected month of a year not underlined is unavailable, but there are very few of those.  Searching by a topic or surname is the most beneficial for a family history researcher.

After doing a search, then a preview appears.  Click ‘page view’ to see the full article on the newspaper’s page.  For example, just putting in the name ‘Titanic’ produced over 9800 articles spanning from 1912 to the 1930s.

Placing surnames in the search can produced thousands of articles with the searched name. Placing the name ‘Williamson’ yielded some 179,000 listings and the family name of Hewitt had over 39,000 listings. The name ‘Kirkland’ had nearly 12,000 items. Placing the surname ‘O’Neil’ had over 12,000 listings ranging from the 1870s to 1920s. The famous names like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt yielded some 37,500 listings.

The site offers some wonderful information and insight especially for anyone with ancestors from New Zealand.