matt.geek.nz

One of my interests is genealogy. It’s a hobby that involves a lot of time and effort, but the web makes it far easier. A researcher’s chances of making connections with distant relatives have exponentially improved. Over the past few years I’ve traced back four or five generations of family, and for some ancestors I’ve gone back as far as seven or eight. I’ve done this both through my own research and through the work of others that I have met online who have done their own research and are willing to share it.

My ancestors were all fairly ordinary: tailors, tree-fellers, builders, immigrants, middle children, scumbags, soldiers. They’d hold little interest for others, but they hold great interest for me, because they’re mine. A genealogy is a kind of spiritual DNA: by looking back you can see echoes of who you are and where you’ve come from, and it gives you a weird kind of confidence. It binds you up with history, and even the smallest details hold some reward.

However, there is one thing that really bothers me about the world of genealogy. It’s a really expensive hobby. In order to clarify and confirm your roots, you’ve got to get hold of ‘vital records’. These are the birth, death and marriage certificates that became prevalent amongst most developed nations in the middle of the 19th century. Before that there were parish registers in most Euro-Christian nations. These are sketchy at best but can provide ways to trace your family back even further.

Parents and grandparents work in powers of two. So you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. If you go ten generations back, you’ve got 1024 eighth-great-grandparents. (Computer scientists may want to think of the set of eight generations of an individual and their parents as a genobyte!)

Vital records generally cost around $NZD20-26. If you wanted to get birth, death and marriage certificates for six generations (about as many as a 25-year-old would have after 1850):

2⁶-1 = 63 individuals (counting self)
Birth certificates = 63
Marriage certificates = 31 (assuming self unmarried)
Death certificates = 56 (assuming parents and grandparents still alive)
Total certificates = 150
Total cost = 150 x NZD$20 = at least NZD$3,000.

That’s just the vital records. You can double that figure for each additional generation, and in order to find more about residences, occupations, and the make-up of families, you need to consult passenger lists, census data, and more. And if you want to trace descendants (e.g. find all the children of all ancestors), you can multiply that $3,000 figure several times (it would be unusual for a genealogist to purchase vital records for anything other than direct ancestors, but it does happen).

These records are held by governments. In New Zealand, the data is held by Births, Deaths and Marriages which is administered by the Department of Internal Affairs. They recently launched a new website which is a boon for genealogists across the country. It allows you to search for historical births, deaths and marriages, and to order certificates online. It also allows you to do interesting things like searching for a combination of a surname and a maiden name to find all the children of a marriage. This sort of research was, until recently, stuck in the dark ages, and involved heading to a library and poring through hundreds of microfiches, finding a reference number, ordering it from Internal Affairs, and hoping you got the right person.

It’s disappointing that the government is still charging so much for these certificates and printouts. The website can only have made things more efficient for them, and will have at least got rid of genealogists queuing up in their offices in Boulcott St with stacks of paper forms (you used to have to fill in a paper form for every single certificate you wanted to order), and reduced the amount of searching that their staff would need to do.

I think this information, once it has passed into history, should be free, scanned, and online. I would be very surprised if they hadn’t already done the scanning. Currently, ten different genealogists researching the same individual will be unaware of each other’s existence, and will each have to pay $20 to get their own copy of the same record: a copy which (in the case of a printout) is nothing but an A3 photocopy. This information is arguably of value to all taxpayers, as everyone has a mother and father. Is Internal Affairs the right owner of this information? Beyond a point, it becomes part of our shared culture: I’d love to see the Ministry of Culture and Heritage incorporate this information into their collection of sites devoted to New Zealand history and heritage: genealogical information gives New Zealand history a sense of personal relevance.

Simon Wilson’s feature in the March issue of Metro claims that Auckland is the new cultural capital. Apparently all the edgy, big budget productions and concerts and shows are happening in Auckland, and Wellington is in disarray: its theatre crippled, its music regional, and international acts giving it a wide berth.

Auckland’s a huge, whirring economic engine, no one would deny that. But a cultural capital?  As Wilson himself points out, they lack four things: the self-confidence, strong champions, business support, and the topography. He sees most of these things as surmountable.  Personally, I think they’re too schizophrenic to have the self-confidence, too bitchy to support their champions, too mercenary to get strong arts support from business, and too Auckland to be anything but Auckland.  Maybe they’ll get over those things.  But in the next five or ten years? Unlikely.

I’m sure they have cultural life.  But where you might spend a weekend coming to Wellington to see the World of Wearable Arts and then head up to Martinborough for a day in the vineyards, in Auckland you spend half your time driving from Cultural Destination to Cultural Destination that it feels less like a Cultural Hub than it does pockets of culture in a sea of depressing spec houses.  When you visit Wellington for culture the destination is part of the package: like Nelson or Queenstown or Dunedin. Auckland is something you tolerate in order to be able to see Bob Dylan at Western Springs.  No one visits Auckland for Auckland.

In the article, Wilson stacks up the major cultural events of Wellington and Auckland, and what he’s called a ‘ledger’: it’s telling that in judging the relative culturedness of the two cities, Metro got their accountant to work it out for them. Unfortunately for him, the title of Cultural Capital is a qualitative one.  It’s the whole experience, and Auckland is just too dire.

Compare “Dominion Road” from The Mutton Birds’ eponymous debut with “Wellington” from Salty: the first evokes the rejected bloke in the halfway house in a city with “antennas in the hills” and  where the only natural beauty is the sun hitting the road which shines “like a strip cut from a sheet metal plate ’cause it’s just been raining.”  Clouds and mountains are symbols of struggle and aspiration.  And Jane, his wife or girlfriend, has moved south (probably to Wellington), in search of something better with one of his friends.

“Wellington” could be a catalogue of the fondest wishes of the protagonist of “Dominion Road”.  It is a place where the weather is terrible (natch), but there’s “so much more to do” than “the other end of the island”.  There are cafes, bars, “the music and the theatre, and the old Cable Car.”  It is a place “you can walk everywhere, ’cause nowhere’s very far.”  “Wellington” is a song of desire and wishing-I-was-there, “Dominion Road” is a song of bleak hope and of wishing-I-was-somewhere-else.