KEY SOURCES

ANCESTRY’S AUSTRALIAN COLLECTION

If you have Worldwide membership of ancestry.co.uk, then you’re free to search the wealth of Australian datasets on the website to help with your Oz research. Whether your forebear was a convict who went over on the First Fleet in the 1700s, or made a new life there more recently, it’s a resource you can’t afford to miss. Holdings include 20th-century electoral rolls; birth, marriage and death indexes dating from 1787; passenger lists; wills and probate records; police records; and transportation records.

AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPERS

Trove is a wonderful free resource, maintained by the National Library of Australia, for anyone looking for their Australian kin. At trove.nla. gov.au you can search diaries, photo archives and (perhaps most usefully) a large database of digitised newspapers.

Using Trove, Keith pieced together the story of his family’s exploits down under, sparked by the discovery of a newspaper report detailing the demise of his ancestor Evelyn Gutcher, who was crushed to death by a horse. Transcriptions and lowresolution PDFs of articles and complete pages are available for free, but you have to pay to download high-quality scans.

NEW SOUTH WALES REGISTRY OF BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES

Apply here for birth, marriage and death certificates for your ancestors – bdm.nsw.gov. au/pages/family-history/ family-history.aspx has some useful information on tracing your Australian relatives. You can also hire a researcher there to pinpoint the certificate that you’re after, if you’re struggling to track it down yourself.