Cemetery DatabaseRaraunga urupā

Public Cemetery Enquiry Database

Please use our online search database to access the district's cemetery records, including interment details, inscriptions and burial photos. You may download and use these images for your own personal purposes but Council holds the copyright on all headstone images, they are not to be used for commercial purposes under any circumstances.

About the database

Our records can be accessed via this easy searchable online database. We encourage you to use this database to try and find the information you but if you have any trouble or still have questions, please contact us on 06 857 8060.

Disclaimer: We make every effort to ensure the information in the cemetery database is correct but accuracy or completeness is not guaranteed. Our aim is to have correct information on the database, so if you come across any information that you believe to be incorrect, please let us know by emailing the correction and supporting verification to us at customerservice@chbdc.govt.nz.

Note: Other sources of genealogy information include funeral directors' records, newspaper death notices, electoral rolls and transcriptions compiled by the NZ Society of Genealogists.

You can access Hastings' Cemetery Database here and Napier's Cemetery Database here.

Help with your searches

If you are having trouble finding the information, we recommend you trying some of these search tricks:

All Fields: This searches every one of the fields listed in the drop down, so you can either enter a name a date, etc.

Given Names (also known as): This searches the given names but also searches another field, which we store 'also known as' names (e.g. nicknames).

Family Name: When searching for a family name, try using just the first few letters of the name as your spelling may be different to what is in the database (e.g. instead of typing 'Smith', type Smi to generate all results beginning with Smi.

Date of Death (dd-mm-yyyy): If you know the date that the deceased person died then you can choose to search by the death date, using the date option in the drop down. Please enter the date formatted 12-10-1978.

Occupation: The effectiveness of this search is only as good as the information we have received regarding the deceased's occupation, with the occupation of some older people simply recorded as 'retired'. Click on the drop down to search by this criteria. 

Last Known Address: You can search by the deceased's last known address when they died but again, the effectiveness of this search is only as good as the information we have received. If they died in a rest home, that may be their last known address.

Inscriptions: This allows you to search the inscriptions that were entered on the deceased's headstone or plaque.

Maps: Click here to view maps and layout of cemeteries in our district.