How to start your family tree in Australia

1Write down what you already know

Start with yourself as number 1 and work backwards: your parents, their parents, and as many great-grandparents as you can name. Don’t research anything yet. The point of this first hour is to see the shape of what you know and, more usefully, the holes.

Use a proper chart from the start. Our free 4-generation pedigree chart has fifteen numbered boxes and space for the four facts that matter for every person: full name, born (date and place), married (date and place), died (date and place). The numbering is the Ahnentafel system: your father is 2, your mother 3, and from there a father is always twice his child’s number and a mother that plus one. Every family-history society and every state index uses it, so your chart will match what you find.

• Women under their birth surname. The records are filed under it. Put the married name in brackets if you like.
• Dates as 12 Mar 1948, so 3/4/48 can never be read two ways. Write “c.” (circa) where you are guessing, and leave a gap rather than invent.
• Places with the state, and the name the place had at the time.
• Pencil for anything you have not seen written down.

2Search the house, and find whoever has the box

Every family has a box, a drawer or a suitcase, and someone is its keeper. Ask. What you are looking for, roughly in order of usefulness:

• Birth, marriage and death certificates, and funeral or memorial booklets (they name the whole family and the cemetery).
• A family bible with a births page, or a prayer book with names inside the cover.
• Photographs with names or dates on the back. Photograph the backs as well as the fronts.
• Service records, discharge papers, medals with a name engraved on the rim.
• Naturalisation papers, passports, ship tickets, and letters from “home”, wherever home was.
• Address books, wedding invitations, newspaper clippings, and the cuttings your grandmother kept.

3Ring the oldest relatives first

Records will keep. People will not. The oldest relatives hold the names, the nicknames and the stories that make a chart of strangers into a family, and they are also the ones who can tell you which of the family stories to doubt.

• Ask open questions (“tell me about your grandmother”) rather than questions with a yes or no answer.
• Ask about brothers and sisters, not just the direct line. Siblings are how you tell two Mary Smiths apart later.
• Ask where people lived, what they did for work, which church, which cemetery. Places are what the indexes search on.
• Write the stories down even when you suspect they are wrong. A wrong story usually has a right one underneath it: the wrong ship, the right year; the wrong town, the right county.
• Record the call if they are happy for you to. You will be glad of their voice, and you will have missed half of it on the day.

If you would like a list of questions to work from, the Morning Post Family Tree carries a rotating set of memory prompts for every person you add, and our Trace Your Family Tree class spends a whole lesson on interviewing.

4Get organised, on paper or on screen

The habit that separates people who finish from people who give up is this: write down where every fact came from, at the moment you find it. “Nan, by phone, 14 Sep 2026” is a source. So is a certificate number, a Trove article, or a headstone photo. Six months on, when two records disagree, the source is how you decide.

On paper

Keep one family group sheet for every couple, a pedigree chart as the summary, and a folder per surname. The group sheets hold what a chart cannot: baptisms, occupations, burials, every child in order, and the sources.

On screen

You do not need software to start, but you will want it once you pass thirty or forty people. The honest options:

• Free: Family Echo (simple, online, no fuss) and FamilySearch (huge free record collection, needs an account, run by the Latter-day Saints church).
• Paid: Ancestry and MyHeritage for their record collections and DNA matching; Findmypast for British and Irish records. Most state and council libraries give you Ancestry and Findmypast free on their computers, so try before you subscribe.
• Private and printable: the Morning Post Family Tree (below) keeps a photo and a story for each person, prints a chart of the whole tree, and exports a GEDCOM file, the standard format every program above can read, so you are never locked in.

5Births, deaths and marriages: how Australian records work

Australia registers births, deaths and marriages by state, not nationally, and civil registration began at different dates in each colony (Tasmania in 1838, the rest between 1841 and 1856; before that, church registers). Each state registry publishes a free historical index online: names, year, registration district and, for later entries, parents’ names. Searching is free. You pay only when you order a certificate, roughly $30 to $60 depending on the state.

The registries publish only historical entries, to protect living people: births after about a century, marriages after fifty to seventy-five years, deaths after about thirty, with the exact cut-offs varying by state. For anyone younger than that you need the certificate, a family member, or a death notice in the newspaper.

Western Australia’s registry does not keep a stable public web address, so the State Library of WA, which holds the WA indexes, is linked instead.

6Trove: the newspapers

Trove, the National Library’s free archive of digitised Australian newspapers, is the single most useful family-history site in the country, and the one beginners underuse. Death and funeral notices name the whole family and the cemetery. “In Memoriam” notices run for years afterwards. Wedding reports name the bridesmaids, who are usually sisters and cousins. Court reports, sports results, ship arrivals and the “personal” columns of country papers record lives no register ever did.

• Search the surname with a town in quotes: “Kilmore” Murphy. Then try the given names, the initials, and the spelling variants.
• Narrow by decade and by state before you narrow by anything else.
• When you find your family, correct the OCR text on the page. The scanned text is often wrong, and correcting it makes the article findable for the next relative and for you next time.
• For deaths after the 1980s, when Trove’s coverage thins, the volunteer-run Ryerson Index indexes death notices from current Australian newspapers.

7Going further: archives, service records, ships and graves

Service records

The National Archives holds the service records of every Australian who served in the First and Second World Wars, digitised and free to read online: enlistment papers with height, eye colour and next of kin, postings, wounds, and letters from families. The Australian War Memorial adds the Roll of Honour, embarkation rolls and unit diaries.

Immigration, naturalisation and ships

The National Archives also holds twentieth-century immigration and naturalisation files; nineteenth-century passenger lists are with the state archives below, and many are indexed free.

State archives: convicts, land, probate, schools

Convict records (New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia were the receiving colonies) are largely indexed free, with trial, ship and assignment details; probate files tell you who inherited what and often list every child; school admission registers give a birth date and a father’s occupation when a birth certificate is out of reach.

Cemeteries and electoral rolls

The Australian Cemeteries Index and Find a Grave carry headstone transcriptions and photographs; a headstone frequently records a birthplace overseas that no Australian document does. Electoral rolls (on Ancestry, free at the library) place a person at an address every few years from 1903, which is how you follow a family between censuses that Australia, unlike Britain, destroyed.

The National Library’s own family history research guide lists the rest, collection by collection.

8The traps

• The family story. Treasure it, then check it. The “three brothers who came out together” and the “Irish rebel” and the “descended from the Governor” are the three commonest stories in Australia, and mostly they are half true.
• Same name, wrong person. Every district had two John Kellys. Match on a date and a place and a spouse or parent before you accept a record, and never take a hint from a website as a fact.
• Spelling. Clerks wrote what they heard. Search Schmidt as Smith, Ó Briain as O’Brien, and use the wildcard characters the indexes allow.
• Changed names. Migrants anglicised names on arrival or later, sometimes officially, sometimes not; naturalisation files record both.
• Colonies, not a country. Before 1901 there was no Australia to be born in, and borders moved: Queensland was part of New South Wales until 1859. Search the colony that existed at the time.
• Living people. Keep the details of anyone living out of anything you publish or upload publicly. The registries protect them for a reason; so should you.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family history runs through records that were made for very different purposes, and it can be painful. The AIATSIS Family History Unit and the Link-Up services in each state exist for exactly this work and understand those records in a way commercial sites do not; start there.
• DNA. A test confirms or rules out relationships and finds living cousins who may hold what you lack. It does not build a tree for you, and the ethnicity pie chart is an estimate. Do the paper first.

9Where to get help

Every state has a genealogical society with a library, volunteers who have solved your problem before, and courses. Membership is cheap and the help is the real thing.

Your state library has a family-history desk and free access to the paid sites (State Library Victoria, State Library of NSW, State Library of Queensland, State Library of WA), and most council libraries do too. And Morning Post members can take the eight-lesson Trace Your Family Tree class at their own pace.

Start today

Print the free 4-generation chart, fill in what you know tonight, and make the first phone call tomorrow. If you read Morning Post in one of these cities, the daily email carries a verified local-history line most mornings, which is where a surprising number of readers first spotted a family name: