The New Zealand Gazette, "official Government newspaper and authoritative journal of constitutional record, published since 1841" (DIA) contains a remarkable variety of subjects, such as:
- registers of government employees, teachers, engineers, electricians and surveyors
- electoral rolls and lists of voting places, candidates and election results
- bankruptcy, company and partnership dissolution notices
- Native Land Court notices
- notices of land taken for roads, railway lines and schools
This project aims to make the Gazette more accessible to genealogists, historians, and everyone else who wants to learn more about the history of government decisions and communications that can be found in the NZ Gazette.
Browse Issues by Year
New Zealand Gazette
Index Statistics
178
Years Covered
25,599
Issues Processed
513,490
Pages Transcribed
8,424,651
Names Identified
2,164,108
Unique Names
1,554,281
Named Officials
102,163
Unique Officials
Questions and Answers
What problem does the NZ Gazette Index solve?
The New Zealand Gazette (along with the Provincial Gazettes) is an extraordinarily rich source of historical information and has been carefully scanned, catalogued and made available online (huge shout-out to NZLII and Victoria University Library). Unfortunately, limitations in the accuracy of the OCR of the scanned pages and the lack of a user-friendly search function meant that finding information within the issues was not easy; nor was gaining a 'bird's-eye view' of the content of issues in a particular year.
Ideally the Gazette would be searchable via Papers Past, but this is not currently possible as "with limited resourcing, we tend not to duplicate content already available online."
What are the goals of this project?
The NZ Gazette Index acts as a modern 'finding aid' for both historical and recent issues of the NZ Gazette. The project's core goals are to:
- Create an accurate nominal (name) index. For genealogists, a dedicated index is much more useful than a generic text search, as historical names are often recorded in numerous variations.
- Provide accessible full-text search, made possible by fresh, AI-driven transcriptions of the original pages.
- Offer high-level summaries so users can easily find specific types of content, such as single-purpose issues (e.g., lists of teachers, nurses, or marriage celebrants).
- Assemble a comprehensive, gap-free collection of both the NZ Gazette and the Provincial Gazettes.
How much of this site is β¨ AI Generated Content?
Transcribing and indexing the enormous amount of text within the NZ Gazette would be a truly daunting task without the help of modern LLM ("AI") tools. All searchable data, Markdown transcriptions, and issue/page summaries were generated using β¨ AI (large language models). While I strive for accuracy, you should verify critical information against the original source PDFs linked on each search result / page.
The majority of page transcription to Markdown was done using the Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct model, and a smaller number with Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct. Pages with more complex layouts such as large tables were transcribed with Gemini-3-Flash and Gemini-3-Pro.
Content analysis (which includes nominal indexing) was done with a variety of models, primarily MistralAI's Devstral-2-123b-Instruct-2512 which proved to be very reliable. Various Google Gemini models (2.5-Flash, 2.5-Flash-Lite and 3.1-Flash-Lite) were also used for some pages.
Models were accessed via several inference providers: Chutes, Nvidia, ElectronHub, OpenRouter, and the Gemini API.
Are there any gaps or missing issues?
Yes! Volumes of the historical Gazettes were bound from loose copies by collecting institutions (archives and libraries), and each institution's copy can differ in page numbering, which years are bound together, whether an index is included, and, crucially, whether any issues are missing. Our primary sources (VUW and NZLII) digitised specific sets of source volumes, so they are missing whatever was absent from those.
Gaps in the Wellington Provincial Gazette were filled from issues digitised by Wellington Recollect; several years of the Taranaki Provincial Gazette came from Puke Ariki Museum (New Plymouth).
Most remaining gaps (including the entire Nelson Provincial Gazette) were filled by volunteers Luke and Carole, who digitised issues held at the National Library and Te Matapihi (Wellington Central Library).
Dozens of gaps remain, listed on each Provincial Gazette's page. If you can locate and digitise any remaining issues (e.g. at the Hocken Library or Auckland War Memorial Museum), it would be greatly appreciated β contact me to discuss how best to share them.
Note: There is one intentional gap. Most years of the Gazette include an issue that indexes the previous year's issues. These index issues have been omitted from the NZ Gazette Index due to simple recursion (an index of an index) and to avoid duplicate search results.
How was the page text transcribed?
One of the main challenges of this project was the need for a fresh transcription (OCR) of each page of the historical issues. The existing PDF OCR had wildly varying accuracy, both at the character/word level and in layout recognition. This made it impossible to search the Gazette text reliably.
Doing a fresh transcription also avoids potential copyright issues, since the OCR text bundled with source PDFs may be considered a separate work from the raw page images, and third parties may hold copyright over it.
Transcription was done using AI models to generate a Markdown version of each page. This preserves much of the Gazette's original formatting, eg headings, italics, and tables. Knowing which text is a heading, or which words belong in a particular table cell, makes AI content analysis more accurate.
The output is by no means perfect. Formatting is inconsistent between pages, and tables in particular often don't come out right, but overall it is a substantial improvement over the original PDF OCR.
How were the names indexed?
AI models read the transcribed text to create the nominal index for each page (with some context of the previous page included) and analyse the text, identifying distinct 'notices' (eg, a bankruptcy notice, or a proclamation) and identifying the individual names within each notice. For each name, the model recorded:
- surname
- forenames (including initials)
- any titles (eg Esquire, Dr)
- the 'context' in which the name is mentioned (eg, a creditor in a bankruptcy notice, or being awarded a military promotion)
Government Officials
The indexing process makes a distinction between the named individuals who were the direct subjects of a notice and the government officials who approved or posted the notice. The officials are recorded in a separate index from the main nominal index.
What about living people?
This project includes recent issues of the NZ Gazette (up to 2017) which contain the names of many living people in a variety of contexts. Inclusion of a name in a list reflects only the information published in that specific issue of the Gazette at that time, and does not necessarily reflect the current status of that individual.
You should always refer to the linked source PDFs to verify information, and consult subsequent issues of the Gazette for possible corrections or errata.
In the interest of privacy for people named in recent issues, search engines (eg, Google) have been instructed not to index Gazette pages from 2000 onwards. However, compliance with these directives is at the discretion of each search engine.
What are these little icons everywhere?
Page content, notices and single-purpose issues have been categorised (by AI) into 'domains' or broad areas of government, represented by icons throughout the website:
- ποΈ Governance & Central Administration
- π° Finance & Revenue
- βοΈ Justice & Law Enforcement
- π External Affairs & Territories
- πͺΆ MΔori Affairs
- πΊοΈ Lands, Settlement & Survey
- πΎ Primary Industries & Resources
- ποΈ Infrastructure & Public Works
- π Transport & Communications
- π Trade, Customs & Industry
- π‘οΈ Defence & Military
- ποΈ War-Related Services & Veterans' Affairs
- π₯ Health & Social Welfare
- π· Labour & Employment
- π Education, Culture & Science
- ποΈ Housing & State Construction
- π’ State Enterprises & Insurance
- π Immigration
- ποΈ Provincial & Local Government
- π¨ Emergency Management
- π° NZ Gazette
These domains are obviously subject to interpretation and have some overlap, but are useful to help quickly distinguish between, for instance, a list of teacher registrations and a list of WWII draft ballots.
Most prominent officials (by Gazette notice)
| Official | Notices | Position |
|---|---|---|
| William Stanley Goosman (1890-1969) | 18,093 notices | Minister of Works, Transport, Marine, Housing, Railways in the First National Government from 1949 to 1954 (Wikipedia) |
| Frank David Thomson (1877-1934) | 17,176 notices | Clerk of the Executive Council and Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department from 1926 to 1934 (Archway) |
| Percy Benjamin Allen (1913-1992) | 16,200 notices | Minister of Works in the Second National Government from 1963 to 1972 (Wikipedia) |
| Thomas James Sherrard (1895-1988) | 14,812 notices | Clerk of the Executive Council and Secretary to the Cabinet from 1948 to 1960 (photo) |
| Sir Charles Fergusson, 7th Baronet (1865-1951) | 10,818 notices | 3rd Governor-General of New Zealand from 1924 to 1930 (Wikipedia) |
| Cecil Albert Jeffery (1888-1970) | 10,768 notices | Clerk of the Executive Council and Secretary to the Cabinet from 1935 to 1946 (Papers Past) |
| William Lambert Young (1913-2009) | 10,453 notices | Minister of Works and Development in the Third National Government from 1975 to 1981 (Wikipedia) |
| James Frank Andrews (1848-1922) | 9,835 notices | Clerk of the Executive Council from 1909 to 1919 (Cyclopedia) |
| Arthur William de Brito Savile Foljambe, 2nd Earl of Liverpool (1870-1941) | 8,520 notices | 16th Governor and 1st Governor-General of New Zealand from 1912 to 1920 (Wikipedia) |
| Bernard Cyril Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg (1889-1963) | 8,397 notices | 7th Governor-General of New Zealand from 1946 to 1952 (Wikipedia) |
