SEARCHING AUSTRALIAN RECORDS FOR INFORMATION ON OUR ANCESTORS
There are a few websites which promise the earth and cost the earth to search through records which may or may not carry details of your ancestors or friends. Let me assure you there are still some organisations that provide use of their search engines for free,
- National Archives of Australia holds all the Federal Governments records from Federation to the present date. A vast expanse of warehouses and reading rooms exist in the ACT and many of the state capitals.
Allow me to show you how the digitised records can be located.
We had an old friend called Margarita Pleskovic. She was a very interesting person, and her biography will be included in this website soon. She was the Grand Aunt of the current Prime Minister of Croatia.
Let’s see if there are any references.
Click on the icon “Record Search” and up will come a page entitled “Record Search”. Where it says “Keywords” type in the full name of your relative. With family names that end with “ch” try it again with only the letter “c”. Now back to Margarita as an example. I type Margarita Pleskovic and Margarita Pleskovich and there are no records. My heart sinks. Not to worry. I type in the name Plenkovic and up come a number of entries for Plenkovic. Archive series number PP246/4 has an entry for Margita (I got the spelling wrong) Plenkovic of Yugoslav nationality; arrived Fremantle per vessel “ORSOVA” 7 January 1930.
So, now it’s your turn to try a relative’s name
- Another excellent website is https://trove.nla.gov.au . It is Australia’s free online research portal. One of its great features is “Trove Newspapers and Gazettes”. It contains digitised copies of most Australian newspapers from the early 19th century until around 1955.
Type into Google the “url” and it leads you to a page entitled “TROVE”. Next, type “Newspapers and gazettes” in the search box. It searches Australia wide but can be filtered down to Western Australia. So, I will again type in Plenkovic with a “c” and a “ch” ending.
There are 13 files that include the name Margita Plenkovich.
Apart from feature stories, news, sport and advertisements these newspapers have a valuable record of Births, Deaths, Marriages and Funeral notices.
That’s it for now, I must have a coffee and start writing my next “POINT OF VIEW”.
Neven Smoje