Australian’s are spoilt by having Australian historical newspapers
available their fingertips and online through Trove. Not
also forgetting that it’s all totally free as well.
Can you believe that there are over 200 million articles already on the National Library of Australia’s Trove Newspapers site, and that figure grows every month, with new papers being
added.
It is a vast resource which is used not only by tens of thousands of Australian genealogists, historians, students and academics on a daily basis, but also by many overseas who are researching something about Australia, or someone who was in Australia.
But how do you search? Type in a name and see what comes up? Well, there’s more to it than that.
When searching newspapers you have to think of how things would be written in the newspaper at the time, which can be quite different to general search websites. So here are some tips for you.
- When searching for a birth, don’t just look
for the person’s name, as they often aren’t mentioned. (ie. On the 23rd
June, at Hobart, Mr and Mrs E. Smith of a daughter)
- When searching use initials, not just their
full name – or an abbreviation (ie. Wm instead of William)
- When looking for a wife, look for “Mrs W.
Baker” (as in wife of Mr William Baker) rather than her own name of
Elizabeth
- Use place name together with a surname to help
narrow down your search
- Or as an alternative to using a place name,
use an occupation and surname
- Remember to use different spellings of names,
as every name has variants
- Remember some places changed name, so look for
a previous place name (ie. Friezland in Brisbane was renamed
to Kuridala in 1916; or Tweedvale in South Australia became Lobethal
etc)
- If you are looking for immigration details and
can’t find a shipping list, look for an obituary. Many say when they
arrived, and often what ship they came in on
- When looking at newspapers don’t dismiss
newspapers from other states, because the news may well have been reported
elsewhere (and sometimes has better information) than the ones you’re
looking at
- When looking for a death, don’t dismiss papers
that occur years after the death as they may be mentioned in a “In
Memoriam” entry
- You’ve done a search, and it’s come up with
1000s of entries, too many to go through every one, use the “Refine Your
Results” options on the left hand side of the page. So you can choose a
state, choose a paper, choose an entry type, narrow down by decade
- When looking at the paper and date range, it
doesn’t mean that ‘every’ issue between that range has been scanned yet.
So check what’s actually covered by browsing
- Also one more point is that the text of the
newspapers has been scanned and OCRd (Optical Character Recognition). So how
well it reads (and can be found by searching), depends on the quality of
the original. Sometimes it’s best to browse, rather than simply rely on
searching as you will pick things up that the search didn’t.
- Check out their Advanced Search options
