One of the oldest universities in New Zealand has identified the names and details of 12,000 imperial soldiers who fought in the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s and compiled the information in a searchable online database.
Victoria University of Wellington’s database, Soldiers of Empire, provides public access to the names, regiments, and dates of service of soldiers who fought in New Zealand. It is the first installment of what will grow into a larger publicly accessible resource.
The goal is to create a database listing the men by name, along with other records of their service in New Zealand and beyond (where possible).
Between 1860 and 1870, about 12,000 British soldiers and sailors served in New Zealand in a set of conflicts described by the War Office in 1902 as among the fifteen ‘principal British wars of 1857-1899.’ The wars have been variously known as the ‘Maori Wars,’ ‘Land Wars,’ ‘New Zealand Wars,’ and imperial wars.
The research, carried out by Professor Charlotte Macdonald and Dr Rebecca Lenihan, draws on records created by the British War Office and held in The National Archives in London.
Professor Macdonald said, “The majority of those who fought against (Māori) iwi were the 12,000 or so British troops who were sent to serve in New Zealand in the 1860s. These were men of regular army regiments, along with Royal Navy marines and colonial militia.”
The professor said about one in five of these soldiers of the empire remained in New Zealand as ‘soldier settlers.’
Elusive ancestors
While the database does not include the date and place of a soldier’s birth, it does provide evidence of another place to search for our elusive ancestors.
For example, I was rather surprised to find a Patrick Dever who served from 1862 to 1866. While I have yet to determine any family connection to this soldier, it is more than likely he came from the part of County Donegal, Ireland where all Devers seem to originate, or perhaps via England or Scotland.
Canadian connection
There is a Canadian connection to the Soldiers of Empire project. Bettina Bradbury, an emerita professor of History at York University in Toronto, is a member of the project’s advisory group. She is the author of a number of major works including Working Families (1993) and Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws and Politics in Nineteenth-century Montreal (2011) for which she was awarded the Garneau Medal in 2015. Professor Bradbury is a member of the Montreal History Group. She is currently working on a history of marriage and inheritance across the British empire.
