Historic Maori land plans found more quickly

Historic Maori land plans found more quickly

News release 11 April 2007

A new way of quickly finding old survey plans of Maori land is being used by a Christchurch company, Heritage Imprints Ltd.

There are an estimated 450,000 historic Maori land survey plans of various kinds held by Land Information New Zealand, dating back to the 1840s.

Historic survey plans for specific areas of land are extremely difficult to find in the immense archive, as it does not have a nominal (or name) index. This is because the system is designed for searching by a legal description.

But Heritage Imprints has developed an alternative system, where inquirers need only know the land’s name or locality address.

With this information, Heritage Imprints can locate the right survey plan right back to the 1840s. The old survey plans are of immense value to whakapapa researchers because they usually list chiefs and their whanau, old pa and marae sites, the original names of geographic and other features, and show former watercourses and water bodies.

The unique survey plan search system was developed by an history researcher Chris Rennie of Christchurch, and is used by Heritage Imprints (www.heritageimprints.co.nz) to provide quality prints of survey plans at full-size to property owners. Their original size when lodged in the old land offices was usually 38 square centimetres.

Heritage Imprints will provide an A4 printout of a survey plan free of charge to the secretary of any registered marae or historical society.

For further information contact Chris Rennie chris@heritageimprints.co.nz www.heritageimprints.co.nz

/He iti ra, he iti mapahi pounamu/

ENDS

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