If your family lived in Tauranga from the 1960s there's a good chance some of that history was captured and is now available online at Tauranga City Council's archive Pae Korokī.
Perhaps an older relative excelled at local sport, worked to put together some of the city's renowned buildings, or spent all their time at the beach.
All these activities and many more are available to view and can provide memories for those who lived it, and insight for the younger generation as to what day-to-day life was like in Tauranga.
Thousands of photographs, paintings, videos, meeting minutes, plans and maps can be found in the online collections.
The keyword search function makes it easy to enter a surname, business, or organisation to see what the happenings were decades ago.
What life was like
TCC community services general manager Barbara Dempsey says Pae Korokī is great tool for anyone looking to discover more about their family history and the development of Tauranga throughout the years. 'A colleague was able to find half a dozen pictures of relatives photographed 60 years ago just by searching a surname, and some of those images had not been seen by the family since printed in the paper at the time.
'It's creating good conversations and memories of what life was like in Tauranga and the stories behind some of the photos.”
Digitisation
Images ranging from the late-1950s through to the mid-1980s, donated to Tauranga City Library by then Bay of Plenty Times owners Gifford and Cross families, make up a portion of the historic photographs available for viewing while content in other collections, including archives and artworks dates to the early 19th Century.
Much of the digitisation of the photographs, artworks and archives over the past two years has been possible via a $100,000 funding grant TCC received from the Lottery Environment and Heritage Fund. TCC's Libraries team recently collaborated with Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision to ensure a range of historic video content is also digitised. If you have questions about the collections or would like to contribute to the archive, email: research@tauranga.govt.nz