Oct 142017
 

The Top 10 theme is running around recently so thought I’d share my Queensland go-to sites. I am not going to number them as that may imply one is better than another.

Queensland Registrar of Births,marriages and Deaths
Queensland registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages is an obvious site although the year only is given (unless you get creative with your searching) in the indexes. And yes, I know you can’t get married after you have died, but for some reason in Australia we always seem to say Births, Deaths and Marriages rather than Births, Marriages and Deaths!

Currently (as of 30 November 2016) the available indexes are:

Births         1829-1916
Marriages  1829-1941
Deaths       1829-1986

Queensland did not separate form New South Wales until 1859 so the entries prior to this are from New South Wales Registry and the entries prior to the New South Wales civil registration are church records of events that occurred in what became Queensland.

The Registrar is in the process of digitising the actual notification documents of marriages and births and I have previously blogged about this on the Genealogical Society of Queensland site

Queensland State Archives
Queensland State Archives is another fantastic resource and their website has increasingly more indexes becoming available. 

Did you know that you can download their indexes as PDFs and some as csv files? 

Then click through to each category to find the link to the indexes . Below is the click through from the Court Category:


Their immigration indexes are also an amazing resource as they are hyperlinked to a PDF copy of the digitised passenger list and so allow you to download the passenger list for your voyage. Their catalogue is good and increasingly there are items down to name level. Realistically the items that are down to name level are only a very small percentage of their over 50+ kilometres of records on the shelves but great when you find one. They have made their research guides available on their website so you can learn about the records and how to access them before your next visit.


Text Queensland
Another great site for Queensland research is Text Queensland

When they say it is Queensland’s past online they are understating the truth. With copies of the Government Gazette, Pugh’s Almanac, copies of various books published by University of Queensland Press, various Journals and, my personal favourite, copies of various theses that University of Queensland scholars have researched for their higher degrees all downloadable as PDFs. 

A true treasure trove!
 

Judy Webster
 
You also have to look at Judy Webster’s Pages if you do any Queensland research. Judy is a well known genealogist and professional researcher who has specialised in Queensland Archives research for many years. She has also done a huge amount of indexing over those years and shares many of those indexes with us on her pages There are more than 135 pages of indexes and information freely available for you. 

Judy has provided a search facility so you can see if your ancestor is mentioned among the more than 53 000 names indexed on her pages. Judy also writes some blogs and her posts on her Queensland Genealogy blog are a must read as she highlights interesting and unusual sources she has found. 

 
Trove
Trove of course is well known to us all and many happy hours have been spent looking at the site from newspapers, photos, maps, theses, diaries and so much more. Do you go back and redo searches for your names? You should! With newspaper additions and the all the wonderful people doing corrections of the OCR (optical character recognition while good does have many mistakes so a search may not find find your person’s name as the text was incorrectly recognised by the computer)

New papers are being digitised and often one paper might report something and give a little more information that another. Shauna Hicks, another well known genealogist, has had great success with this as she found a sketch of one of her ancestors in the newspaper. The person was appearing in court. Now this paper has not yet been digitised. 

It is important to remember that although a number of papers have been digitised not all are available online. Many are available however at the State library on microfilm or in hardcopy; there are also some specialist papers that are only available in hard-copy so it is important to look at the State Library catalogue. The State Library also has a number of online resources available too so make sure you explore their website and not just the catalogue!

Remember papers past the 1954 copyright time frame for digistisation will be available at the Queensland State Library in hard copy or microfilm. They may also be held at other State Libraries and University Libraries.

These were the Queensland papers added in March this year to join the many other digitised Queensland newspapers.  A list current as of 30 November 2016 is here

Q150 Celebrations
 In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations the government released some  files which are wonderful for family historians for some social context.

You can download the file as a complete Excel file or as individual files.


From these statistics we can see that a male born in Queensland in 1881 had a life expectancy of 41.3 years while if born in 2005 he would have a life expectancy of 78.9 years. Certainly there were some people who lived to a good age in the 1880s but as there was high child mortality it skews the figures and decreases the average life expectancy.
 
In 1876 there were 1000 liquor licenses in Queensland and this equates to 54.9 licenses per 1000 head of population. Interestingly in 2007-08 there were 6958 licenses which equates to 16.5 licenses per 1000 head of population. While this could be interpreted to say people are drinking less today I suspect it actually has a lot more to do with the ease of transport today and the increasing consumption in the home in comparison to 1876. 

The population by country/region of birth 1861 – 2006 also makes interesting reading. At least they did do something with the data of all those censuses they destroyed!

It is a great time to be doing Queensland research and there are so many other wonderful resources both online and offline.

Why not leave a message and share with us a fantastic Queensland resource that you have found?

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