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A Christchurch man has bought the rights to a large historical archive of maps and surveys.
Chris Rennie, a public relations consultant and keen map collector, says he owns the rights to Land Information New Zealand's database.
This has given him the ability to sell historic property survey plans dating from the 1800s.
Heritage Imprints, his business, has developed a system of finding old survey plans using a property's current street address, and reproducing the plan on art paper as it would have originally looked.
"Years ago, the survey plans were put into secure archive storage by Land Information New Zealand and today are usually consulted only when historical property boundaries need checking or are in dispute," he said.
Heritage Imprints takes a digital copy of a plan to restore it to what it would have looked like when the surveyor originally lodged it in the Land Office, Rennie said.
Heritage Imprints is offering historical and museum societies and marae original survey plans of the land they stand on, free of charge, Rennie said.
The original plans contain a wealth of historical information because the early surveyors usually included the names of homeowners or tenants, and were so meticulous they even sometimes drew the location of the outside toilet and the fowl house, Rennie said.
Theses plans are usually consulted only when a surveyor needs to delve into issues relating to access and boundaries.
He said the database gave him access to about eight million plans dating from 1840-1972.
