Hutt City Libraries Heritage Centre

Hutt City Libraries Heritage Centre

Petone Community Library

Britannia Street

Hutt City Libraries Heritage Centre

Hutt City Libraries has a Heritage Centre located at the Petone Library. Specialist staff are available to assist with local and family history enquiries. Email Petone.Library@huttcity.govt.nz to get in touch with them.

Items held in the Heritage Centre include:

Books
Books on all aspects of life in Lower Hutt; books by Lower Hutt residents; a selection of local histories from other parts of New Zealand; genealogy; reference works to assist with further research.

Periodicals
Selection of periodicals published in Lower Hutt; local and family history magazines, eg. NZGenealogist.

School magazines
Representative collection of magazines from schools in Lower Hutt. Hutt City Libraries aim to collect comprehensively and is actively seeking to fill gaps. Searchable on Hutt City Libraries catalogue.

Newspapers
Substantial collection of local newspapers, on microfilm and in hardcopy including:

  • Hutt News 1946-1998 (on microfilm); paper holdings from 1999 to present; 1927-45 available online through Papers Past; May 2011 to present available online
  • Evening Post 1865-1971; Jun 1977– 2002 (microfilm) 1865-1945 available online through Papers Past
  • Dominion Post from July 2002 – (on going)(microfilm)
  • Hutt and Petone Chronicle 1891-94; 1905-12; 1931-35; 1953-66 (microfilm)
  • Papers Past also contains other newspapers of interest, including the New Zealand Gazette, New Zealand Colonist and Wellington Independent.
  • Other community newspapers are held on microfilm and paper formats, see the Hutt City Libraries’ online catalogue for details
  • Hutt City Libraries indexed local newspapers for many years. Some index entries are searchable on Hutt City Libraries catalogue; the remainder are on cards held at the Heritage Centre.
  • Several sets of scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, mostly from The Evening Post and The Hutt News. Searchable on Hutt City Libraries catalogue.

Electoral Rolls
Rolls for Lower Hutt electorates from 1982 to the present.

Directories and almanacs
A representative collection of street, Post Office, business and telephone directories for the Hutt and Wellington are available in hardcopy, microform and CD-Rom. Searchable on the Library catalogue.

Microfiche
New Zealand Births, Deaths and Marriages up to 1990.

Photographs
A selection of photographs of Lower Hutt. Most copied from other organisations such as National Library.

Family History Resources

Microfiche and CD-Rom’s including Early Wellington Settlers and NZSG Kiwi Index.

Oral History Recording Equipment
Hutt City Libraries is currently developing a collection of oral histories. It also has two Fostex oral history recorders for hire ($10 per day).

To find out more contact the Library’s Family History Specialist, Tricia Meehan tricia.meehan@huttcity.govt.nz, (04) 560 1013

Hutt City Libraries usually requires customers to have received training from the National Library's Oral History Centrebefore borrowing the recorders and to deposit a set of the recordings with the Library’s Heritage Centre at Petone Library.