How to research your ancestors

How To Get Started

Where do you start, below are a few steps to help you get started.

Marriage Certificate

The first step is to find your parents’ marriage certificate.

  • On this certificate will be the date and place of their marriage, witnesses, perhaps some information on their fathers.
  • Each state in Australia has a Births Deaths and Marriages website in which you can search generally for free, however certificates will incur a cost.

The Trove Website

Trove is a very useful website. It is run by the National Library of Australia who are digitalising all papers across Australia. You can search for any word or place or a combination, there are newspapers as well as photographs, diaries etc. Trove is free and you can setup a free account in which you can then save articles that you are interested in to lists to access later.

The link is https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/

Cemetery Records

Again most towns or cities will have a website that allows you to search their cemetery records for free. A free site which has cemetery records for towns across Australia is Lorraine’s Burial Records.

The link is http://www.ozburials.com/CemsWA/waus.htm

Historical Societies

Finally Historical Societies in towns may have additional information, or libraries in cities and regional centres may be to assist with further research.