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Historical spelling and macrons

Historical records can contain Māori names without macrons, with inconsistent word division, printer conventions, surveyor spellings or transcription errors.

The right GIS model usually keeps source form and working/normalised form separately.

name_as_source
name_normalised
name_current_gazetteer
name_id
source_date
source_ref

Do not silently modernise quotations​

If an 1870 plan says Maungatautari and the current official form contains different orthography, record the historical label exactly as the source. Use the modern/linked name in a separate field.

Search both forms​

Historical search systems generally work better if you try:

  • with and without macrons
  • joined/separated words
  • older transliteration/spelling variants
  • common OCR substitutions

Unicode​

Store text as UTF-8. Shapefile/old DBF workflows can lose macrons if encoding metadata is missing; GeoPackage is a safer working format.

See OCR and fuzzy searching.

Last reviewed: 26 August 2026

Last updated on