Search Otago Nominal Index
Surname and Forenames
Birth Date
Age
Sex
Occupation
Event Description
Event Place
Event Date
Source Title
Volume/Issue
Page
Publication Date
Comment
There are two search options available: Basic and Advanced.
Basic has a keyword option, which does not need to be a name.
The Advanced search page has 14 fields on which to search.
Below the Comments field at the bottom of the page there is an option to sort results by Name or Event Date.
When the results of the search are displayed click on a Surname to see the full details. If no surname is shown, click on the lower of the two hyphens.Search results
Regardless of the search undertaken, the results will display the following five field headings:
Surname - clicking on this entry will take you to the entry, with all known fields.
Forename
Address
Event Place
Date
SURNAME
Surnames are in upper case. The data base had the ability to store up to five names for any individual. All "alternative" names will appear on the search results page.
If the name of an organisation appeared to include persons' names (e.g. Scoullar & Chisholm, a record is included for each name and the name of the organisation is shown in the Comments field. Scottish surnames may appear in any of these three forms: M', Mc, Mac and thus each form requires a separate search.
FORENAME
Miss and Mrs are included after the forenames if they were noted as that in the document. In the later records many married women will have their maiden name noted in the Surname field. For example - née BURNS. Titles such as Sir and the abbreviations jnr and snr are shown after forenames. Nicknames are usually shown in the forenames field.
When searching for Chinese names, look in both the Surname and Forename fields for each part of the name.
ADDRESS
If known several records may be included for each business or residential address.AGE
Until 1873 electors in this period had to be male and 21 years or over so in the Electoral Rolls age is given as 'Over 20'. For Jurors' Lists age is given as '21 to 60'. Age is normally in years but 'm' indicates months and 'd' indicates days for example 9m or 5d.
Most of the other documents indexed did not include this information.BIRTHDATE
Note that only males could be on Electoral Rolls prior to 1893. The Juror's List was probably the same. For people listed in Street Directories or Police Gazettes, sex is shown in the index only if specifically indicated in the document (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Esq, Sir). Sex was not assumed from typical masculine or feminine forenames or inferred from occupations.
This was rarely given except for the 1898 Jubilee publications which included many instances of biographical notes.OCCUPATION
For a business such as Craig, Bain & Co both surnames were indexed and the occupation noted as printers even though one may be an accountant or one may have died.EVENT DESCRIPTION
The event that is being indexed. For most records the event is the person's appearance in an Electoral Roll or a Street Directory.The following abbreviations have been used:
HR = House of Representatives
OPC = Otago Provincial Council
SPC = Southland Provincial CouncilFor records from Police Gazettes, the event shows either Criminal suspect, Criminal offender, Crime victim, Police force or Personal mention, to indicate the person's role in the event. This is followed by brief details of the event. More information is often included in the Comments field. In the 1898 Jubilee publications the event descriptions biographical notes and photographs were included.
EVENT PLACE
The place to which the electoral roll or street directory applied, usually an electorate or a town, or the place where an event such as a crime occurred. It may only show that it was Otago.EVENT DATE
This may be shown in a variety of formats. It can have qualifiers such as 'before' and 'about'. It can also have expressions like 'ult' (ultimo - in the last month) and 'inst' (instant -in the same month). It may also show month only or day and month only (without any year).
When an Event Date in a document appeared to be incorrect, a mention of this is made in the Comments field.SOURCE TITLE
Records the document from which the names were indexed.VOLUME/ISSUE
Only applied to the Otago Provincial Government Gazette (1855 - 1864)PAGE NO.
Page number in the source document. Note that page numbers in street directories were in Roman Numerals. If these Roman numerals were incorrect in the document, they were still shown as that in the page number field. A reference to the correct number was noted in the Comments field.PUBLICATION DATE
The date of the original document which was consulted for the indexing project.COMMENTS
Other relevant information is entered here, and in many cases may contain a wealth of information about the subject.
In 1989 the Hocken Library (now the Hocken Collections) and the New Zealand Society of Genealogists Dunedin Branch commenced a joint project to produce an index to names of people in documents held by the library.
For more detailed information about the indexing project see an article by Noel Read in "The NZ Genealogist" March 2002, pages 121 to 125.
Ownership of the Otago Nominal Index resides with the Hocken Collections. This web version of the database is hosted by the University of Otago Library.