New Zealand Cemetery Directory

Sources and licences

Every name, place and plot here comes from a public record. We tidy spelling and join the same cemetery written different ways. Where a record gives a cemetery’s name without its town, we join it to the one cemetery of that name that clearly fits, or leave the district blank. Nothing else is filled in. If a record is wrong, the source holds the correction.

Online Cenotaph, Auckland War Memorial Museum

Resting places and grave references for each soldier. Data sourced from Auckland Museum’s Online Cenotaph, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand

Cemetery locations from the Topo50 layers NZ Cemetery Points and NZ Cemetery Polygons. Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0. LINZ gives cemetery locations, not burials: the soldiers in each cemetery come from the records below. Where LINZ leaves a cemetery unnamed we join it to a named cemetery only when the known site sits within 800 metres, and otherwise leave it without a pin.

LINZ Basemaps aerial imagery and NZ Addresses

Aerial photos from LINZ Basemaps. Imagery: LINZ, CC BY 4.0. The dashed outline is the LINZ NZ Cemetery Polygons layer. Street addresses with a LINZ source are the LINZ NZ Addresses point inside the cemetery outline, or within 60 metres of its point where there is no outline, licensed CC BY 4.0.

OpenStreetMap

Some addresses, operators, websites, faiths and opening dates come from OpenStreetMap. © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Each one links to the OpenStreetMap record it came from.

Council and operator contacts

Each council’s website, phone and email come from the council’s own website, or from its Wikidata record (CC0) where its site could not be read. A few cemeteries show details from their operator’s own website, such as the Purewa Trust. Every detail has a “source” link. Where nothing is published we leave it blank rather than guess. The local council is the council for the area; a church, trust or marae may run the cemetery itself.

Councils

• Christchurch City Council, Open Data (cemetery plots and cemetery boundaries), CC BY 4.0.
• Marlborough District Council, Open Data (cemetery plots with details, cemetery boundaries), CC BY 4.0.
• Palmerston North City Council, Palmy GeoHub (cemetery plots and cemeteries), CC BY 4.0.

Council burial records are matched to a soldier only when the surname and forenames agree and the date of death is the same day (or within a day), and no other soldier fits. Where only the year agrees, the soldier is marked possible match: please check it with the council before you rely on it. Palmerston North publishes plot positions without names, so a plot there is placed on the map only from the plot number in his own Cenotaph record.

Links to each council’s own cemetery search are links only. Nothing from those search pages is copied here.

Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa

Region, district and nearest town for each mapped cemetery, from the Regional Council 2025, Territorial Authority 2025 and Urban Rural 2026 boundaries, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

For men who died between 4 August 1914 and 31 August 1921, the soldier’s record links to a search of the CWGC war dead records. No CWGC data is copied here.