Dannevirke library volunteer’s passion for helping family stories come to light

Allie Lundon at work in the Dannevirke Library where she volunteers, researching family trees for people.

Allie Lundon once discovered a recording of a mother’s voice.

It allowed the daughter of the woman - who had died when her daughter was young - to hear her mother’s voice.

“That’s why I do it. The happiness it brings to people and the peace it brings to people,” she says.

Allie is a volunteer at Dannevirke library, where she helps people uncover family stories and research their genealogy.

It started off with research into her own family tree where she had information on scraps of paper but most of it was wrong.

“It took me about three years coming in here to sort out my own tree,” she says.

“And through that process, friends of mine asked me to look into their family tree.”

Allie says over time, the girls at the library got to know her and what she was doing and eventually she was asked if she would be willing to be the volunteer genealogist there.

She’s often there six days a week and thinks of the staff as “family”.

“The library’s my community. There’s so much this library’s got going for it. It’s brilliant.”

Allie says she gets queries not just for people looking for information on their ancestors but also for living descendants or finding old friends.

And she does it for free.

“Everything I do is for free. It’s for the love of it.”

Each year the amount of cases she works on seems to grow.

She says in the first year it was 100 cases, then the next it was more than 200.

“This year [I’ve had} 924 so far. And it’s not just me doing it. There’s other researchers on our groups as well.”

Finding information can be challenging sometimes and takes a bit of thinking “outside the box”.

“That doesn’t always work either,” Allie says.

Having an analytical mind helps as she can think of things that other people don’t.

“Sometimes I can fluke it and then I find the documentation and I rattle all the cupboards and look under every stone.

“I love the hunt as much as finding the people.”

Researching family stories in a way brings them “back to life”.

“You get this understanding of the humanity of people. You get this understanding of how life was,” Allie says.

“That also keeps them alive.”

One story she has been working on is that of a man who was born in New Zealand but turned out to be a “scallywag” who stole from his employer then took off for England.

Several years later, the man disappeared, leaving former wives and numerous children.

In another case, Allie was researching a man who was known to be “a no good, grumpy old git” but she found information on his background which explained why he was the way he was and gave the woman researching his background a better understanding of him.

Allie believes the current interest in genealogy is because people have “lost connection”

“They want that connection back, and this is one way of doing it.”

She says there are cultures around the world, especially Māori culture, where whakapapa is paramount.

“It’s part of who you are.”

International Volunteer Day is on December 5, and is a chance for individual volunteers, communities and organisations to promote their contributions to development at the local, national and international levels.