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What I’m trying to do here is put flesh on the dry names and dates in our family trees by telling their stories. I’m writing from clippings, notes and photos our parents left, our own recollections and what I’ve found online. If you have feedback, corrections or can help fill in the many gaps, please let me know in the comments. ~ Ian

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The word whakapapa is used a lot now, and I set out to tell mine, with Heather’s to follow. It’s really a term I’m not qualified to go near¹, so I’m using it strictly in the day to day Kiwi sense — to tell about our family, how we got here, and where we called home before we became New Zealanders. Focused on our own parents and grandparents, and their siblings, cousins and predecessors. I admire these people and I’d hate to see them forgotten.

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I understand Maori tell their whakapapa, but really I’m trying to discover mine. I’m not tracing my lineage from my ancestors to the present day, but the reverse — looking backwards. My DNA tells me I’m English, Scottish and Irish — that’s it. Past a few generations I can’t name my ancestors. They’re lost in the bubbling stew that boiled over and out of Europe through the last few centuries and spread throughout the world.

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First priority was to publish my father Cliff’s stories about the Depression and World War 2. Next was to delve into the cabinets and cupboards I’ve mentioned elsewhere — full of diaries and letters and stories and family trees — and photos and artefacts and fabrics — that our parents and grandparents have passed down to us.

I’ve gone down the ancestry.com rabbit hole, started to build a family tree, come across people doing the same, discovered relations I never knew — as well as how much work goes into validating names, dates and relationships. But the real challenge is to turn those names into people and tell their stories.

It’s obviously work in progress. More than anything else it’s underlining how little I know — and how much I want to know. I’ve started to feel closer to some of those names. There’s the great-grandmother I can’t remember but whose knee I sat on. There’s my grandfather’s description of their lives as kauri bushmen. There are his two brothers who fought at Chunuk Bair, and my grandmother’s brothers who died at Passchendaele. There’s my great-great grandmother’s diary from Whakatane in the 1890s — and the time old Te Kooti came to visit. There are the Masons meeting in Jerusalem. And much more, but still far more gaps than stories.

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This is family lore, not family history. By and large I haven’t tried to validate what they’ve left behind in the way a historian would, just passed it on, as they did for us. But in the process — aided by ancestry.com, old newspapers, Wikipedia etc — I’ve tried to tell their stories and turn them into flesh and blood characters, not just stilted faces in old photographs.

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If I’ve commented or passed judgment occasionally, I hope it was the exception not the rule. I think that generally speaking a healthy society is one that’s proud of the people who built what it enjoys today. I’d rather ask whether our forbears would be proud of us than stand in judgment of them.