Pos S  46° 12.130'
E 168° 52.857'

Southland gets a lot of rain and was originally a swampier place than most.

The cemetery is a little way out on the hill to the east of the town. Take Crawford Road and climb up out of the river valley and an abrupt turn to the right that has the cemetery block about a kilometre on the right.

It's quite a large place and well tended but its location is a place where the cloud commonly hugs the ridges with the result that often the place is misty and damp and all headstones tend to have a generous growth of moss and lichen while the trees are draped with the same.

On the southern shelterbelt of trees we found an unexpected resident; a Kauri tree that normally does not grow south of lattitude 33 but which must have been planted by some lost Northerner many years ago.

We have now gone to a live on-line database called MOP ('Myra's Other Place') and all the older records listed are being steadily being copied over. In this case we did not have a page for Mangapai before now so you will have to go directly to MOP. The MOP database has a lot more than just cemetery records and is worth checking out here where you can log in as Guest password guest.

To find a person enter the surname in the target box and presss ENTER. This will list every case of that surname across all cemeteries. To list all persons in a particular cemetery enter the name of the cemetery and change the pull-down option immediately to the left from LAST NAME to CEMETERY then ENTER.