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New Zealand Wesleyan Missionary Correspondence [MS-39] (1817 - 1859)

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Description This collection includes digitised typescript copies of letters, journal extracts, reports, and minutes sent from Wesleyan (Methodist) missionaries in New Zealand to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in London, England, from 1817 to 1859.

In 1937, the original material was borrowed from England by Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt, and a small team of typists at the Methodist Connexional Office in Christchurch transcribed the nearly 1,300 handwritten documents. At the conclusion of World War II, the originals were then returned to England, and the typescript copies were archived at the Connexional Office. Carbon copies of the typescripts are also held by the John Kinder Library in Auckland and the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

The original documents were later microfilmed, and more recently, these microfilms were digitised and the digital copies can now be found online via the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website. However, due to the variable quality of the microfilm and the challenge of deciphering nineteenth-century handwriting, research into this material has been difficult to date.

In 2024, we completed the digitisation of our typescript copies, and the whole collection is now available to browse and research here on Kei Muri Māpara. The website's in-built OCR (optical character recognition) technology, means that this hugely significant collection is now fully text-searchable to researchers for the first time.

The collection was initially arranged in chronological order by Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt. Later, Verna Mossong from the Auckland Methodist Archives created an alphabetical arrangement by author using a carbon copy set. A further duplicate set, once held in the Auckland Methodist Archives, includes a page-number index created by Rev. Donald Phillipps (see boxes 17-21).

Date Range1817 - 1859Parent CollectionNational Archives

Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, MS-39 - Correspondence - Letter to Secretaries from John Hobbs (1831). [Kei Muri Māpara/Methodist Church of New Zealand Archives Christchurch, MS-39, box 1, folder 6]. https://keimurimāpara.methodist.org.nz/nodes/view/3305

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New Zealand Wesleyan Missionary Correspondence [MS-39] (1817 - 1859)

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