Genealogical research

Top tips

• Find out all of the individual’s given names  and maiden names (if applicable) and birth date or at least year  – especially if the surname is a common one  (e.g. Smith).

• Think about contact between your family and the government and identify which level of government (migration, education, health, defence, security and intelligence etc).

• Use Ancestry.com (Library edition) to find out information from Electoral rolls, Passenger lists, Citizenship & Naturalisation Records, Births, Deaths and Marriages and more that will help you more effectively use other databases like the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV) and the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
• Search PROV and/or NAA to find government records.
• If you identify related key organisations, dates, events and other people in government records, look these up in Trove to find newspaper articles from the same time period  and get an idea of the social context.
• Further identify social and political context with journal articles – Informit is a great database for Australian humanities and social sciences research and includes some primary sources too.

Why can't I find them? Possible reasons:

• Spelling and transcription errors.
• Name variations – MacDonald or McDonald, Thompson or Thomson. Even Brown may have been written down as Browne, Braun, Bowen or Bourne. Perhaps they shortened or anglicised their surname - Goldstein to Gold or Schmidt to Smith. First names might also have been abbreviated - John to Jack, Johann to John, Margaret to Betty or Peg and so on.
• Age – try searching with a broader age range – people often lied about their age for various reasons and the birth date wasn’t always recorded.
• Place of birth and location listed  – check neighbouring areas too, check ship names, check hospitals, hostels, boarding houses etc
• Not everything is online and not everything has been indexed.
• if you cannot find a death certificate try to find a burial register for the relevant parish church or identify the cemeteries for the town where you ancestor lived and then try and obtain a cemetery record.

• Click the Search button to reveal a drop down menu.
• Select Births, Deaths and Marriages or Census & Voter lists or Immigration and travel.
• Make sure you're looking in the relevant country collection (Australia, UK, US, etc).
• Enter as much information as you can to increase the relevance of your results.
• At least include name and place, and if it is a common name (such as John Smith), then you will probably want to add a birth year too. Include relatives names.
• Think of possible given name variations - Old records often used standard abbreviations for first names (Jno = Jonathon, Wm = William, Hny = Henry, Cth = Catherine), initials may be used in place of middle names, try to find out women’s surnames before marriage, think of nicknames (Liam = William, Jack= John, Peg = Margaret).

The following is an example of what a search for records of Desmond Frost Symonds from Dunedin, New Zealand might look like. 

Filter all results by Census and voter lists; Immigration and travel; maps, atlases and gazetteers; and more!