Thread: New South Wales Australia BDM

As usually happens on New Years Day the NSW BDM site has extended the years you can search for.

Births 1911
Marriages 1961
Deaths 1981

This is a free site and very useful in tracing people in New South Wales Australia. I do not recommend purchasing Certificates direct from them though, they are too expensive. Best to go through a Transcription Agent as when you order through them you get all the information on the registration and not just a few like you get from BDM themselves. The links for transcription agents and their websites can be found under the heading of Trace Your Family Tree then at the bottom of the page.

Here is the link for BDM.

NSW Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages

Thank you Kate. I have bookmarked that one for future use.

Glad it helped Marion. I just wish all states of Australia had the same, no they require you to purchase CD's on the records and they are so expensive. In the last couple of years Queensland put theirs online with births to 1914, Marriages to 1934 and Deaths to 1964 and where theirs is better is that they give you the mothers maiden name not only on the marriages but on births and deaths as well. West Aust has some of theirs online too. Tasmania only have some of their early records online.

Probably one of the handiest resources is in the National Library. It gives you links to sites that can be looked up state by state as well as National and International. Some of them can only be looked up the library as they are on CD but many are direct links. It has war records for both wars including both Nominal Rolls and for WWI it has the AIF Project. Just heaps of information. Here is the link.

eResources - Browse categories

So glad it helped Marion. NSW BDM are promising us a new site this year that is supposed to be much improved. The existing site was much better when you could do a wildcard search but they disabled it. You only had to put in 1 letter and then a star, so you could just put in the first initial of a surname and the star and it would find everything with that initial, mind you it was better if you could put in more than one letter and then the star as it reduced the results. Was so handy if you were not sure of the spelling. You could even put the star in the middle of a name if say you didn't know if the letter was an a or e or an e or an o. As I said they disabled that and you have to use a ? now but you have to put a ? for each letter you are not sure of and that only works if there is the same number of letters in the alternate spelling which is not always the case. Even with the correct number of ? you don't necessarily get any answer at all as I have found.

Using the wildcard search enabled me to find the death of my GG Grandfather who one relative had been searching for for 25 years without result. His last name was originally Stecher which was anglicized to Stacker, but his death was registered as Stitter caused by my GG Grandmothers very heavy German accent. I just put in St* and the first name of Frederick and then looked through the results, found one in the same area they were living purchased the certificate through a Transcription Agent who gave me a certificate with all the information on it. It had all his children on the certificate as well as his wife's maiden name to confirm it was the correct person. It also gave me all the correct names of the children who were named in the German tradition where all the boys were given the same first name and were then known by their middle name and there was some family confusion with 2 of the boys, it cleared that up with there ages.