Sexton Wayne Tamanui said council was keen to find the families to find out whether they wanted to restore the headstones or if they were happy to have them laid flat across the graves. Either solution would meet the threat of the heavy stone slabs toppling.
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"We dud a safety check recently of those that could topple. We didn't want any kids playing there and having it fall on them."
Mr Tamanui, who has worked at the cemetery for 18 years, said the weight of history rather than land shifting was responsible for the headstones getting on a lean. It was a problem of an earlier time with modern cemetery regulations barring headstones from topping a metre.
The cemeteries captured earlier times not only through the information recorded on the headstones but the way it was kept. Embedded lead lettering was used on some - an art which Mr Tamanui said was virtually forgotten now.
Graves at Waikumete Cemetery date from the 1880s. The cemetery was established as the original Symonds Street cemetery filled and new ground was needed. The site was chosen on the basis of a then-planned nearby railway station, said Mr Tamanui.
Now, it incorporates almost a dozen religions and is home to two urupa. It attracts not just mourners but "usually people that are coming to piece together whakapapa", he said.
The earliest of the seven plots in need of descendants is dated from 1905 and is for Jessie McGregor, wife of Malcolm Shaw Darrach. There is no sign Mr Darrach was buried with her, but the plot also records the interrment of Cecil Soden, her son-in-law.
The seven plots - like the rest of Waikumete - resonate with details from an earlier time. "It gets you," said Mr Tamanui. "We look after our residents here. It's our history."
NZ Society of Genealogists Auckland convenor Ray Turner said the internet had proved a massive boon to those trying to trace family trees.
He said the Papers Past resource - operated by the National Library - provided great leads with death notices often pointing to members of subsequent generations. Council websites, including in Auckland, also offered searchable cemetery databases which sometimes included photographs of headstones.
Mr Turner said the maintenance of headstones of ancestors could be a costly exercise, particularly if a memorial had fallen and broken. He said he had been called on to cover costs for headstones at the Symonds Street cemetery which cost between $500 and $1000 to repair and erect each memorial.
