Nora MacKinnon-Gold

I work alone, in a small back room with too many folders on the floor. Most of the material I touch comes in batches: a family's correspondence box, a parish register transcript, a set of estate ledgers from one of the smaller islands, sometimes a single executor's inventory that has gone missing from a sequence and turned up unexplained.

The work is slow on purpose. I will sit with a single page of an 18th or 19th century inventory for a long time before I write anything down. Names in this period rarely behave. They change spelling between a baptismal record, a manumission entry, and an estate book kept on the same property, sometimes inside the same year. I keep all of those variants. I do not pick a favourite and silently drop the rest.

I am not a historian. I do not write the books. I help make sure the books do not lie by accident. That mostly means asking the same questions in a slightly different order each time: where did this document live before it lived in this folder; whose handwriting is this; what is the document NOT telling us; what would the next document in this sequence look like, if it existed.

I work with writers on long projects, families putting their own papers in order before donating them, small island museums and parish offices with no dedicated archivist, and occasionally a university researcher who has hit a section they cannot read alone. I do not run a firm. There is no team.

I am based in Auckland. The work is by appointment, in slow correspondence, and usually in fragments. If you want me to look at something, the best first step is a short email describing what you have, where it came from, and what you already think it is.