Australian records

Question

The National Library of Australia has a site aptly named "Trove". If you're looking for clues in Australia, it really is a treasure trove. Among other things, they have scans of all sorts of Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954. 

Over the weekend, while looking for a third cousin of mine, I happened upon somebody famous with the same name, and, as it turned out, I only needed to add his parents to connect him to somebody I had already entered as part of the family tree of Sir Benjamin Slade (he who is looking for somebody to whom to bequeath ye olde ancestral manor)¹.

So I added Walter (the famous one -- not my cousin -- still looking for him), but then the question naturally arose of what happened to him after he moved to Melbourne and joined the stock market there. My search turned up a hit on the trove site, and then I found out all kinds of stuff. (Not all pleasant, but that's research for you.)

I particularly like the implicit deal with using the site: there's no paywall (as I have seen on other newspaper archive sites), but there is the option of correcting the text as transcribed by OCR software. Since the text needed to be corrected to be useful as a source anyway, I didn't mind putting in a few minutes to do that, in return for access to the information. Win-win.

Greg

1. Nope. I have no connection to Sir Ben, or any of his ancestors. (Or at least none that I've found so far.) But I had pretty much hit a brick wall in getting any farther back than my great-great-great grandfather, and I thought it might be easier to start way back and work forward. No such luck.

Comments

The thought belatedly occurs to me to wonder if there's a page on here listing all of these kinds of places for people to look for sources. If so, I should really be adding links like this there.

Greg

---

One of my favourite sites.

You can also tag articles you are interested in to pull up later and it gives the option of clipping and saving what you want as well as help with the recommended way to cite it as a source.

Invaluable!

---

Yeah. I love the cite feature!

---

I have checked with Trove and it is OK to add links to WikiTree profiles in the comments section. This is OK as long as it adds value to Trove. The response I received from Trove was:

As the links you are providing are to give users further information about the subject of an article they are acceptable. If they were to a website where users were required to purchase access to see the information, or to websites that had no relation to the articles in question, then this would be considered in breach of the 'no commercial activity' or 'post relevant content' terms of use. Generally comments considered inappropriate are removed without warning, although in some cases comments may be removed accidentally through either system or human error.

Here is an example of where I have added a comment:

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12954704

it points to Oxley-34

Answer 1

I have been trying to create just such a resource for free sources of information:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Genealogy_Help

additions are always welcome. It came about from my frustration when looking at many other extensive lists trying link after link only to find that the majority of links led to some sort of payment being required, so, in keeping with the WIkiTree ethos, "information should be free", I decided to start such a page.

Just find your region and select the type of resource you are looking for. For example, the equivalent resource to Trove in New Zealand is Papers Past

 

Comments

Thanks for the info about Papers Past, I had never heard of that before... have already found some references to my ancestors - awesomeness!!! :-)

---

That is awesome. Bookmarking the home page...