Central & Western Murihiku Southland Archive on eHive

The Central & Western Murihiku Southland Archive has been set up as a community archive project, to digitally gather, store, preserve, record and share our district history. It is especially important for those local communities who have no history repository locally, to have a place to keep a copy of their local heritage safe and to promote the history of their communities and those who settled them. But all district histories are welcome here. So, if your district, town, farm, business or family are within our area and you would like to have the history of this recorded for our current and future generations, please make contact. This is a free community service. Our motto is: "By Community, For Community". We accept photos, articles, memories, books, records, maps, ephemera and all paper based items for digitizing and putting into this new archive. You can also ask us to take photographs of objects and properties for the archive. Oral history is something else we will be working on shortly. If you have a story of local history to tell, please do let us know. Remember this is YOUR archive as part of your local community, a place where you can save and store any local history, without it leaving your ownership. This archive is a place where everybody in the community can contribute, comment, interact, share memories and our combined history. We do not take your important history to keep, we professionally copy it, ensure these copies are safe and share them with the community. Your heritage remains in your hands. So if you have precious family memories you want to share with others but retain ownership of, this community archive is for you. The area we will be covering with the archive is one in which the settlers within it often moved around to live and work in different local districts, so their family collections can be held together and not spread across varying institutions. The Western part of the district covered by the archive will be roughly from Piopiotahi/Fiordland in the West, right across the Waiau District, and along the coast south west coast, down into the Aparima/Riverton in the South. We are focusing on the Waiau area in the beginning, mainly as our museum here does not have any online presence or set opening hours. We have also started with preserving the history of the Eastern Bush community first up, as it is an area without a fully recorded written and photographic history and with quite a few long-standing families moving out of the area in recent years, it was imperative that the history of this community and its important past stories and heritage be saved for our future generations. If you can provide any photos and information from the Eastern Bush area, please contact our local Digitisation Project Manager as below, for how you can help out. We hope to have a community information event soon. We will also have a small fee based research service based within the online archive, which will help to fund the growth of the project. If you are looking for information on any family, person, business, farm, property or event within the local area and in the districts we cover, we can quite possibly help you with this, as we have a trained historical researcher. Please contact the Social History Project Manager for information about our research service, as per the details below: The archive is completely digital so is only available online, but the beauty of this is that it can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, 24/7. As this is a new site, a new model and a community voluntary project, please can you bear with us as we progress, grow and add new features. The plan is for each local community to have their own entries within this site and for all the early settler families in each of these, to also be included in that, with a brief history and photos. If you can help with this by providing yours, please contact as below. For more information, questions or donations, please just ask.