BI-MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Sep – Oct 2026 

Our latest Bugle: Volume 40 number3 is now available as an attachment with this newsletter. (see below)                                  

Hi everyone.  Update time again.

In the last bi-monthly newsletter I asked some questions about our website.  We were seeking some feed-back, as to whether people were going online and making use of the various resources.. Are you using it? Is it useful? Is it helping your research? Are you looking at the back issues of the Bugle? Are the indexes useful? Have you looked at the research guides? Will you make use of it if we make more resources available? Do you have any suggestions as to how we can make it better? If you haven’t checked it out please do so and let us know what you think .Unfortunately we got very little feedback.

Auckland Family History Expo Update

This is a much larger venue, with better parking, close rail access with Middlemore station just down the road within easy walking distance.

We are delighted to share updates about the Auckland Family History Expo 2026, which will take place over three exciting days in October. The Expo brings together family historians, genealogists, industry organisations, and researchers from across New Zealand, Australia and beyond. We will be there with our database and I am possibly taking part in the following panel discussion as well as presenting on our database.

Sunday 10.30am to 11.20am Nancy Bale MC - Panel discussion: Lost and Found: Reuniting families with their military heritage (Still waiting confirmation)

Sunday 11.30am to 12.20pm, New Zealand Fencible Society Using the Fencibles database.  (This is confirmed)

There is a long list of speakers. The printable programme can be downloaded at:

https://genealogy.org.nz/Auckland-Family-History-Expo/11491/

Website/Database:

The website continues to be generating membership as can be seen by the number of names recorded in the Member Interest List on the back page of The Bugle.

The number of individual names on the database continues to grow and is now almost at 92,000. We are still keen to receive family trees from members to add to the database. In particular we are keen to grow the Empire Veteran side

Work has continued to provide additional research categories on the website by adding two new categories. This is part of our policy to make more resources available online.

New Categories

:1. Ship Records: So far we have the Medical Journal and the Ships Log for the Sir George Seymour as well as background stories for the Minerva, Sir Robert Sale and the Sir George Seymour. Over time we will add more resources for this category.

 2. British Regiments in NZ: This category provides a link to articles in our magazine about the British Army Regiments that served in the NZ Wars. Over time we will add similar resources for the regiments which our Fencibles served in..

Fencible dossier data input

Work continues with this project. It is time consuming and continues to slowly progress, particularly when I come across a dossier which has sizeable family tree material that has to be loaded onto the database.This happened when I worked on the McCRORY dossier. These dossiers help us to grow the number of names on the database. We will shortly begin work on the N’s.

EmpireVeterans. It is important we let people know our database has been expanded to include the Empire Veteran men.  I hope as this becomes more widely known descendants and military researchers will join us to make use of our database. For those of you who are NZSG members and you attend group meetings please spread the word.. I have visited the Wellsford NZSG Group promoting our website/database

Garth