We welcome any query on Who When Where. If you have previously posted it on another forum (including the old WDYTYA forum), please state this in your opening post - this will save people redoing the research which has been done before: they can look at it and possibly go further with it.

Australian BMD Idexes on Ancestry

Tell members about what you have found useful, and find out about other researchers' go-to resources.
Post Reply
User avatar
AdrianBruce
Posts: 358
Joined: 14 Jun 2020, 18:57
Location: South Cheshire

Australian BMD Idexes on Ancestry

Post by AdrianBruce »

Feel free to say that you knew all this already but...

For some time I have been relying on BMD indexes from the Australian states (usually). These vary in helpfulness - e.g. one state's detailed data is behind a genealogical society's paywall, while only very basic data is available outside.

Purely by chance - because I don't work on my Australian families very often - I found that Ancestry have three consolidated indexes that are actually easier to use than the state versions. The three are:
  • Australia, Birth Index, 1788-1922;
  • Australia, Marriage Index, 1788-1950;
  • Australia, Death Index, 1787-1985.
Ancestry put the usual coverage caveats on but the resulting three collections are very useful to me because:
  • Each collection covers the whole of Australia in one query, rather than one state only;
  • The stuff otherwise behind the genealogy society's paywall is accessible to me - it's behind Ancestry's paywall of course, but that's where I am;
  • The Victoria death indexes (at least) actually have more data on the Ancestry version than on the state's own index - in the examples I was looking at, Ancestry gives a place where the state's index just says "Victoria".
Note that these Australian BMD indexes sometimes give the exact date and sometimes relatives such as parents.
Adrian Bruce
Post Reply