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New Zealand Emigration and Immigration


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Offices and Archives to Contact

Archives New Zealand (Head Office)

Archives New Zealand
10 Mulgrave St
Wellington, New Zealand

PO Box 12050
Wellington, New Zealand
Telephone: +64 4 499 5595
Fax: +64 4 495 6210
info@archives.govt.nz

"We hold a variety of ship records, mostly in Wellington. All passenger lists held in Wellington have been digitized and are available through the FamilySearch website under ‘New Zealand Immigration Passenger Lists ’.

Passenger lists: "Card indexes have been created, from all surviving passenger lists and immigrant information held at our Wellington archive, of those assisted to New Zealand by the New Zealand Company, other colonising ventures, provincial and central governments, 1840-1880s. These card indexes are held in the Wellington Reading Room.
  • General Biographical Index c1840-1880s [Bio 1]
  • Assisted Immigration Scheme Index 1871-1888 [IM 15]
  • Canterbury Provincial Assisted Immigrants Index
  • Additionally, ships’ papers from nineteenth century voyages, especially in the 1870s, may include reports on the voyages and other information. References to these papers are also in the card indexes."[1]

Auckland Regional Office of Archives New Zealand

Archives New Zealand
Auckland Regional Office
95 Richard Pearse Drive
Mangere, Manukau. 2022
Auckland
New Zealand

Telephone: (64-9) 270-1100
Fax: (64-9) 276 4472
Email: auckland@archives.govt.nz
Website

Mailing address:
PO Box 201103 Auckland Airport
Manukau. 2150
New Zealand

Finding the Town of Origin in New Zealand

If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in New Zealand, see New Zealand Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

New Zealand Emigration and Immigration

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration to New Zealand

  • The Māori were the first people to reach New Zealand, followed by the early European settlers.
  • Following colonization, immigrants were predominantly from Britain, Ireland and Australia because of restrictive policies.
  • There was also significant Dutch, Dalmatian, German, and Italian immigration, together with indirect European immigration through Australia, North America, South America and South Africa.
  • Beginning in 1871 the New Zealand Government began to offer assisted passages to selected immigrants and others nominated by relatives. The migration of the 1870s was the most significant in New Zealand history.
  • In 1874 thousands of assisted immigrants arrived in New Zealand, forming the greatest level of migration ever. Almost half of the new immigrants came with government assistance. Three-quarters of these sailed directly from the United Kingdom. Because of economic difficulties in the later 19th century, assistance was finally terminated.
  • In 1891 New Zealand received the last small group of assisted migrants. However, assisted migration was restored in 1904 when the country's economy returned to prosperity, making it once more an attractive country to new immigrants. During the early 20th century one-third of the immigrants came from Australia and two-thirds from the United Kingdom.
  • Net migration increased after the Second World War; in the 1970s and 1980s policies were relaxed, and immigration from Asia was promoted.
  • In 2009–10, an annual target of 45,000–50,000 permanent residence approvals was set by the New Zealand Immigration Service.
  • In the 2018 census, 27.4% of people counted were not born in New Zealand, up from 25.2% in the 2013 census.
  • Over half (52.4%) of New Zealand's overseas-born population lives in the Auckland Region.
  • The United Kingdom remains the largest source of New Zealand's immigrant population, with around a quarter of all overseas-born New Zealanders born *Other major sources of New Zealand's overseas-born population are China, India, Australia, South Africa, Fiji and Samoa.[2]

Emigration From New Zealand

While most New Zealanders live in New Zealand, there is also a significant diaspora abroad, estimated as of 2001 at over 460,000 or 14 percent of the international total of New Zealand-born. Of these, 360,000, over three-quarters of the New Zealand-born population residing outside of New Zealand, live in Australia. Other communities of New Zealanders abroad are concentrated in other English-speaking countries, specifically the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, with smaller numbers located elsewhere.[3]

Records of New Zealand Emigrants in Their Destination Nations

Dark thin font green pin Version 4.png One option is to look for records about the ancestor in the country of destination, the country they immigrated into. See links to Wiki articles about immigration records for major destination countries below. Additional Wiki articles for other destinations can be found at Category:Emigration and Immigration Records.

Types of Records

Archives New Zealand has produced the useful Migration Reference Guide to the history of migration in New Zealand and the records generated.

Passenger lists are not the only types of records generated by emigrants/immigrants. Emigration and immigration records are those generated by people leaving one country (emigrating) and coming into another (immigrating). These records include:

  • Permissions to emigrate
  • Records of passports issued
  • Correspondence
  • Statements of sponsorship
  • Records of assisted immigrants


The information in these records may include:

  • names of the emigrants,
  • ages,
  • occupations,
  • destinations, and
  • sometimes the place of origin or birthplace of the emigrant.

Some records have been known to include:

  • the names of the parents of adult emigrants,
  • whether living or deceased,
  • their places of birth, and
  • occupations.
  • Where immigrants were sponsored, the information on the sponsor is included. These sponsors were either family members or future employers and provided information on the location of eventual settlement in New Zealand.

In addition to their usefulness in determining where an emigrant lived in the country before leaving their country of birth, these records can help in constructing family groups.

  • Single adults sometimes emigrated with siblings, children usually came with parents, and as mentioned above, some records give even further family information.
  • It was also a common practice to emigrate to a place a relative had already settled, so extended family members can also be found.
  • If not going to a relative, many emigrants joined people from their home town, thus communities may be known for predominantly German, Danish, or English settlement.
  • Sometimes the determining factor was religion, where a congregation would move almost en masse to a new country to escape either real or perceived persecution, or in an attempt to more fully live their religion in a country not yet bound by religious tradition.
  • In some cases, immigration was assisted by a company which needed workers to develop and work the land that the company had purchased.

For Further Reading

There are additional sources listed in the FamilySearch Catalog:

The following thesis gives information about continental European immigrants.

References

  1. ↑ Migration Reference Guide, Archives New Zealand, http://archives.govt.nz/research/guides/migration, accessed 1 July 2021.
  2. ↑ "New Zealanders", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealanders, accessed 30 June 2021.
  3. ↑ "Demographics of New Zealand," in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_Zealand#Migration, accessed 30 June 2021.



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