Tauranga Mission Cemetery

Tauranga Mission Cemetery is the oldest European burial ground in the Bay of Plenty city of Tauranga. Located on Marsh Street at the northern end of Te Papa peninsula, the cemetery is situated on a rocky promontory overlooking the harbour. It stands on the site once occupied by the Ngāi Te Rangi pā of Otamataha.

For many years the cemetery was referred to as the Military Cemetery. There are monuments to the Naval Brigade, the 43rd Monmouth Regiment, and a mass Māori grave. Rawiri Puhirake, leader of the iwi at Gate Pā, who was killed at Te Ranga, was exhumed and reinterred here in 1874. Hori Ngatai, whose account of Gate Pā appears in Mair's The Story of Gate Pā, was buried here when he died in 1912.

The cemetery is thought to contain the remains of about 100 imperial and colonial troops and 14 Māori warriors who died while on active service in the Tauranga district during the New Zealand Wars. Fewer than half of the graves are marked with headstones or ground plaques.

The cemetery is part of a 7863 square metre site transferred from the New Zealand Mission Trust to the Otamataha Trust - the Hapu of Ngati Tapu and Ngaitamarawaho - in 2014.

Links

• History on kete.net.nz
• Burials on kete.net.nz
• NZ History web page on Tauranga Mission Cemetery
• Find-a-Grave
• BillionGraves

New Zealand Cemeteries Team

This page is maintained by the New Zealand Cemeteries Team, who are part of the Global Cemeteries Project (and the Oceania Cemeteries Team). The aim is is to document the final resting place of those buried in New Zealand, to ensure that each cemetery has its own free-space page, which is linked to the category structure for Global Cemeteries, and that those buried in them are also gathered in the correct category.

• Currently there are 1 profiles listed on Wikitree for this cemetery, which is well short of the number of interments. Findagrave has 164 entries, and Billion Graves has 266. Irwin-2099 21:34, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

The overall progress of this endeavour will be found on the NZ Cemeteries Team Progress page.