NLA Australian Newspapers

Anyone researching ancestors within Australia should check out the National Library of Australia's Australian Newspapers Web site. It features scanned images and digitised text of historic Australian newspapers between 1803 and 1954. I spent a bit of time playing with the beta earlier this year, and was very happy to see version 1.0 released in August (2009). There were certainly some great improvements made between the beta and final release. I love being able to make corrections to the digitised text and hopefully enable someone else to find the information they're after. I was reading that 6000+ members of the public have corrected 7 million lines of newspaper text so far. Pretty impressive! There are still quite a few gaps in availability, so be sure to check out the Availability Schedule. I'm itching for the remainder of my newspapers to come on-line next year.

One tip I'll give in regards to searching. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software used to create the digitised text isn't all that good sometimes, so you need to be a bit creative. Often letters will be mistaken for others, such as an 'a' being mistaken for an 'o' or an 'e'. For instance, if I'm looking for the surname Sage, I'll also try searching for Sago, Sogo, Soge etc. I've had quite a few good finds using this technique.

Getting Started

After speaking with people over the past few years, I've come to the conclusion that many people would like to create a family tree, but just don't know where to start. I know I was in the same situation when starting out a few years ago. Hopefully this blog will help people out and point them towards some great resources, both online and off.

So, my first recommendation when starting out is to create a free account with Ancestry.com.au (or .com, .co.uk). Ancestry is just awesome. I love the layout of the site and the ease at which you can create a pretty impressive tree. While I've found other sites better for making connections with family members, their layout and tree making are lacking. One of the best things about starting out with an online tree, is the ability to show and share your work with others. When you're ready to get yourself a serious genealogy program, you can simply export your tree.