Church and Parish Jubilee Histories

Though for many people their local church no longer holds the importance it once did, for generations of Wellingtonians these institutions provided a valuable social anchor for their communities that extended well beyond their traditional role of offering spiritual guidance. Similar to our collection of school jubilee histories, church histories can offer a fascinating insight into a suburb's past at a local level which is often ignored by other history books. In the case of Wellington's inner-city parishes, these histories can be a useful source of information into the social conditions of communities which later dispersed as people moved out to the suburbs from the 1960s and the inner-city population fell to negligible levels until it began to revive from the mid-1990s. Wellington City Libraries has been collecting church and parish histories from across New Zealand for many years and a selection of Wellington-based examples from our collection are digitised here on our Recollect site.