Detective Tui tracks ancestors
Family secrets are no match for Tui Lewis, as she dons her detective hat and delves into her family history.
With a passion for genealogy, Lewis has been tracing her family tree and has discovered family members signing the Treaty of Waitangi and joining travelling performers in the English countryside.
Lewis’ mum was originally the family historian, with Lewis helping out. After she passed away in 2009, Lewis took up the researching mantle.
‘‘[My mother] did a lot of the hard yards.’’
Lewis started out researching in the library, using her mother’s methods but eventually she moved online, using resources like ancestry.com.
Before her mum died, Lewis would share what she found online with her.
‘‘Every day I would ring my mum and say ‘look I found this person’ and she’d say ‘stop digging up skeletons!’.’’
‘‘When my mum passed wanted to start recording.’’
Lewis has been able to follow her mother’s family back to Europe and England and she’s found a theatrical thread running through her genes. She’s related to Roma and her great grandmother, Nellie, married into the theatrical life with George Frederick Rayner of Rayner’s Travelling Theatre of Grand Varieties. ‘‘It’s like being a detective.’’ Her father’s side is Maori and
Italks to a woman with a love of genealogy. ‘‘We all came from the same people, we have all shared parts of each other.’’
that proved tougher for Lewis to track. What she has found however, is that her fourth great grandfather, Whetoi Pomare II, was a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi.
She also found on her father’s side that her great grandmother’s father was fisherman Charles Alma Baker.
As well as tracing the family tree, Lewis said she also sent off some of her spit to Canadian testing firm 23 and Me to map out her DNA.
All up she’s found about 700 people she’s connected to.
‘‘We all came from the same people, we have all shared parts of each other.’’
Many people talk to each other through genealogy websites, sharing stories and figuring out their connections.
‘‘That gets me going when I’m away from council - finding out what makes people tick and their strengths and weaknesses too.’’