A wealth of information can be found in historical newspapers and Gazettes. In Australia, family historians and historical researchers are able to access Australian newspapers and Gazettes in the TROVE discovery service hosted by the National Library of Australia. To date, they have digitised more than 227 million newspaper pages dating back to 1803. The full text of newspaper articles in Trove is extracted from page images using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The accuracy of the OCR process is influenced by a range of factors including the font and the quality of the images; however, many errors slip through. Volunteers have done a remarkable job in correcting these errors, but it’s a huge task. In addition, some people have reported difficulty in conducting searches through Trove. In response to the latter, we are working on transcribing early lists found in publications with direct links back to the original articles on Trove. 

The Australian Joint Copying Project is a collection of unique historical material relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific dating from 1560 to 1984. The documents were copied over a 49 year period between 1949 and 1998 and are now available through an online portal with the National Library of Australia (NLA). A number of bundles of original correspondence found through the AJCP Portal contain lists of names on many different subjects. Our current and ongoing project is to identify these records and transcribe them to make these available to family historians. Databases will be added to our site as each one is completed and are available. Links have been provided to the original record.

These databases and/or transcriptions have been transcribed from historical sources published prior to 1920. Links have been provided where sources are available online.