What's the best way of collating data for this project?

we are building the single referene point with this project, breaking new ground :) hopefully it will draw in lots of people to help and speed up the process

http://www.yesteryears.co.nz/ is the best shipping list site but has no additional info on the passengers other then just their names

I like this breaking of new ground. What I'm trying to avoid is duplicate researching of the same names.
Some of the earlier passenger lists look a lot more challenging as
they often don't seem to have first names
The only ones I have cracked so far are where the name appears in a local paper. But I think this only works for people of Newsworthiness.
The only way I can think to solve these ones is via cross-tabulating the passengers lists with other data.

yes ive pretty much covered a couple of ships, the lists had errors and omissions. e.g Edmund Sarten recorded as Edward Saartan, and some families i can find no information on once they arrived.

try filling out the already researched families and you will soon find they married into the families that are missing, early new zealand had a tiny population. 1842 NZ pakeha population 10,992

That s what is good about starting as early as possible
Highly unlikely that NZ at that time would have both a Edward Saartan and a Edmund Sarten.
I have noticed high mortality rates on some of the earliest ships, some families seem to land and then die after a few years.
One of my great-grandfathers, as family oral history says: parents died on the trip, then the children were basically handed out to other families, taken into care etc. "Still haven't worked out which ship that was"?

i read 60 people died of small pox on one ship, there are a number of ships diaries you can read which talk about the mortality rates in detail

this is a good read

http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1991/NZJH_25_2_04.pdf