About the Detectologist

nz genealogist

NZ Genealogist Nikki Eagle is a family history specialist based on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. She’s available to assist you in your quest by providing professional family tree services & research, solving a mystery or locating your biological family members. Nikki is a fun-loving, full of life, friendly & self confessed family history geek. She’s approachable, down to earth and eager to assist you in any way she can.

  • 2018 University of Strathclyde – Glasgow. Certificate of Achievement – Genealogy, Researching your Family Tree.
  • Co-founder of the Kaikoura Family History Club
  • Member of NZ Society of Genealogists
  • Member of the International Society for Genetic Genealogy
  • Member of the Berkshire Family History Society
  • Member of the Oxford Family History Society

Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of lineages and history. Nikki uses oral interviews, historical records, genetic genealogy analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family. Researching your family can be exciting but also sometimes surprising or shocking and always entertaining. She is incredibly passionate about what she does and lives and breaths all things old, nostalgic or historic!

She loves to carve out a place for one’s family in the larger historical picture and feels a strong calling and responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Check out her family history website “Courageous Colonials” which she’s created to share her knowledge with her wider whanau.

When not researching (hardly ever!), Nikki loves traveling & seeking out the historic home towns and old haunts of her ancestors, hanging out in cemeteries, reading history books and historic novels, eating cheese & chocolate biscuits (not at the same time of course), metal detecting, all round treasure hunting…and touring & exploring provincial New Zealand with husband Jon in their beloved bus “El Viaje”. She dreams of finding a valuable rare coin or a gold nugget as big as her head so she can hit the road permanently and become a full time gypsy genealogist.

History & Travel

Family History Researcher

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Travel broadens the mind… and provides opportunity to explore the actual locations one’s forebears lived in.

Visiting the villages that your ancestors originated from is an amazing experience.

nz genealogist
Hanging out with a long lost cousin in Edinburgh, Scotland.
nz genealogist
Striking the smithy’s anvil in Gretna Green, no sign of any eloping ancestors today though!
nz genealogist
Channeling my inner Viking in Norway, May 2019

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