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Fact Sheet 6 

When you can't find a BDM record

  

If no record can be found in the BDM indexes, you may like to consider the following options:

 

Records which may help in fiding out about a birth 

  • Baptismal records
  • Death and Marriage certificates of the person
  • Brother’s and/or Sister’s Birth certificates
  • War service records
  • Biographical publications of pioneers that are often published by historical societies and held in major libraries 
  • Land records
  • Hospital records 

 

Records which may help in finding out about a marriage 

  • Church records, for example marriage banns
  • War service records
  • Birth certificates of children of the marriage
  • Death certificates (may give details of spouse)
  • Biographical publications of pioneers that are often published by historical societies and held in major libraries 

 

Records which may help in finding out about a death 

  • Cemetery Records
  • Inquests
  • Electoral Rolls
  • Biographical publications of pioneers that are often published by historical societies and held in major libraries 

 

Other options

  • Family Bible
  • Back of family photos
  • Newspapers/magazines and indexes - there are a range of BDM "classifieds" that have been indexed and could be held in a library. You should contact your state library or the local historical society as they may have compiled an unpublished index either newspapers or to cemetery records. *Note: It may be of use to check the Ryerson Index - an index to contemporary death notices and obituaries in Australian newspapers
  • Census records
  • Employment and or union records
  • Mission records – baptisms, marriages, births and deaths (correspondence and school records)
  • Reserve and other government records – letters, reports, censuses, diaries, records of children in training institutions. Records may be either still at the reserve or in the appropriate state archive.

These are only a few of the possible other sources of family history information, for more see Family History Guides

 

 

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 Updated: January 2008

 

 

 

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