Start Your Family Tree Week - 26 December - 1 January

Day 5 - 30 December

Do you have people in your tree born before 1911? Look them up in the 1911 census. Findmypast is the only place you can search the official, complete 1911 census.

Were your ancestors living with their parents in 1911? If so, add these names to your tree. You’ll be able to work out rough birth dates from their ages in 1911. Use our handy date calculator to help you.

The 1911 census for England and Wales was taken on the night of Sunday 2 April, 1911. The count included all individual households, plus institutions such as prisons, workhouses, naval vessels and merchant vessels, and it also attempted to make an approximate count of the homeless.

Discover vital information about your ancestors such as where they lived, age at the time of the census, Who they were living with, place of birth, occupation and more.

For the first time ever, we’ve made the infirmity column of the 1911 census available for you to view. See how your ancestors reported your family’s illnesses and conditions and the age at which these began. This can provide a revealing insight into the previously censored health of your family in 1911, as well as your ancestors’ views of their relations’ wellbeing.

On the 1911 census transcriptions, you’ll also be able to see any recorded details of children born to women in prison who were aged three or under at the time of the census.

Great news!

We recently reduced the price of viewing our 1911 census records! You can now view an original image for 5 credits (previously 30) and 1911 census transcript for 5 credits (previously 10).

Start Your Family Tree Week 26 December - 1 January

Day One - Boxing Day

Boxing Day is the perfect day to catch up with your family. Make the most of seeing your relatives, especially the older members, and ask them about themselves and other relatives they remember. Discover what life was like for them when they were growing up.

We have created this Family Tree Chart (PDF) for you as great resource. Fill in as much of it as you can, while you’re with your family. It will help guide you through starting your family tree. Once you have filled in this chart, transfer your findings to our free family tree to create a secure online version.

Use our handy Interview Guide (PDF) to guide you and find out as much as you can.

If you’re new to family history then use our Getting Started Guide to help you on your way.

Rosemary Kopittke has been tracing her family history since 1985. A statistician by training, she has worked in that field as an hydrologist, teacher and biometrician. Her tertiary qualifications include a BSc (Mathematics) and BA (Computer Science) both from the University of Queensland. She currently works as a consultant for Gould Genealogy & History and is regularly invited to speak on findmypast and other topics at events in Australia and New Zealand.

She has published numerous indexes to cemeteries and government records though is probably best known for her work with husband Eric on the Emigrants from Hamburg to Australasia 1850–1879 publication. She is editor of Unlock the Past publications and author and contributor to several.

A current member of the Australasian Federation of Family History Organisations (AFFHO) Council and the Queensland FHS Management Committee, Rosemary is a Fellow of the Queensland Family History Society and in 2006 received the AFFHO Award for Meritorious Services to Family History.

Part 2 - Filtering

Instead of creating individual searches specifically designed for each individual dataset, the new findmypast sites use the basic search described in Part 1 of this blog in conjunction with a set of filters.

You can select filters before setting the Who, When, and Where search parameters if you already know how you wish to narrow your search AND/OR after you have done a search if you wish to filter the results that your search has returned.

There are five basic types of filter available –Country, Category of the record, Record collection, Record set, and Record type. All appear on the left side of your search screen.

Country filter – this lists the countries for which data appears. The figure in brackets following each country is the number of ‘records’ for that country (remember for digitised data each page is counted just as a single record). Initially, the list is in order of decreasing record count. You can select one or more countries by clicking the box next to the countries – those countries then go to the top of the list.

Category filter – all data is allocated one of eight categories. You can narrow a search by selecting one or more of these categories.

Record collection filter – depending on your search and other filters selected you will get a list here of record collections available. If you pre-select the Category of Newspapers, Directories & Social History then you get the Record collections as shown in the image on the right. Choose one or more of these to further refine a search.

Record set filter – following on the example in the previous paragraph, if you select the Directories & Almanacs collection then the list of record sets applicable will be listed (partial list in image on right). Selecting one or more of these will narrow your search to those particular sets of records.

Record Type filter – a very simple but powerful filter with just two options – ‘Records’ includes the data that is fully indexed (for which a search with first/last name is most appropriate) while ‘Documents’ is the digitised/PDF data (for which searching with Keywords is more effective).

Other filters – depending on the records you are searching other filters may also be available; for example, with some Australian data you can also filter by State and, should you be searching the UK census records, additional filters include Other Household Member, County, Birth Year, Birth County, Birth Place, Birth Town, City, Town, and Registration District.

Set as few or as many filters as you want. Try them out – both before and after a search – and see how they can let you control what you want from the data.

Try your new filtering skills today!

For more detailed information on how to best use findmypast.com.au you can buy a copy of Rosemary’s new book, New findmypast.com.au: Gateway to the World Collection

Rosemary Kopittke has been tracing her family history since 1985. She is an experienced genealogist and currently works as a consultant for Gould Genealogy & History. Rosemary is regularly invited to speak on findmypast and other topics at events in Australia and New Zealand. Enjoy part one of Rosemary’s tips  on how to get the best out of findmypast.com.au.

Part 1 - Basic Searching

The greatly expanded Australia and New Zealand collection containing over 135 million records is now available for researchers to explore and discover amazing details about their family or local history.

The basic search as offered on both the home and search pages gives the option of searching by Who, When and Where with Keywords to assist in refining the search. What could be simpler?

It appears logical and straightforward to search using these criteria but what isn’t obvious to the new user is that the data actually includes 1.2 million pages of data which has been digitised – such as you would find on Trove. That means it does not have fields which are recognised as names, places or dates – the computer simply knows it as text. With this in mind let’s look at how we can use this search to get us started on locating the information we seek.

First/Last Name – it is clear this is the place to enter names of those you are researching. It is not obvious though that you can also enter place names, occupations and other information here and the search will find matches in data that has been scanned (not, however, in fully indexed data) – it does work, try it for yourself. Be aware though that, for scanned data, it will simply find records where the words you enter in First/Last Name appear on the same page of the document!

Year range – a year range covering the period you wish to search; if you just wish to search a single year then enter it into ‘From’ and once you hit the Search button the ‘To’ year will automatically fill

Keywords – words you want to appear in the record (can include names), perhaps an occupation, address or similar. Currently, these must be words that are adjacent to each other in the data and in the exact order. So, for example, a search using amos wickerson and another using wickerson amos will return quite different results (any intervening punctuation such as commas and full stops is ignored).

Name variants – selecting the name variants will return variants for both the first/last names; for example, a first name of William will also find Willy and Wm as well as just the initial W.

Wildcard searches – these can be very helpful for detecting names where you know that spelling or transcription problems are likely to occur; for example, Kopittke can be recorded as Kopittke, Kopitke, Kopitkie (and many others). The use of a wildcard, ‘?’ for a single character or ‘*’ for a string of characters of any length, can be useful in these situations.

Try these new skills and search now!

For more detailed information on how to best use findmypast.com.au you can buy a copy of Rosemary’s new book, New findmypast.com.au: Gateway to the World Collection

Getting Started In Family History

By Shauna Hicks

Shauna worked in government for over 35 years primarily in libraries and archives including the State Library of Queensland, the John Oxley Library in Brisbane, the Queensland State Archives, the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and Public Record Office Victoria in Melbourne. She is currently Director of her own research and consultancy business.

Shauna has been tracing her own family history since 1977 and is a Fellow of the Queensland Family History Society. In 2009 Shauna received the Australasian Federation of Family History Organisations (AFFHO) Services to Family History Award for her achievements in Queensland, Canberra and Victoria.

Shauna Hicks on her first day of school

It’s fairly easy to start looking for your ancestors these days with many online resources to give you a head start. Your local genealogy society is also a great place to see resources that are not online and you will meet others happy to assist with your research.

First you need to gather as much family information as you can from within your own family working backwards from yourself. Once you have basic information you can then obtain birth, death and marriage certificates to help you confirm those family findings, and to progress your research further back with clues from the certificates.

Note all the information on the certificates – not just the names. Occupations and addresses are also important for placing families within their communities. For example, with an address you can then use records such as post office directories and electoral rolls to trace where your ancestors lived over time. Occupations may also be recorded. For example, in findmypast.com.au there is a wide range of these resources for every Australian State and Territory as well as New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.

Another thing to note on death certificates is where a person was buried. There may be burial records or transcribed monumental inscriptions from tombstones with more information and there is an ever growing list of these records online. As most of my ancestors are buried in Brisbane I find using the Bulimba, Toowong and South Brisbane (Dutton Park) MIs on findmypast.com.au really handy, especially as I now live in Melbourne.

I try to document all aspects of my ancestors’ lives, and school records may be useful for those early years. School admission registers usually record a date of birth, a parent’s name and occupation, address and of course, the child’s progress at school. The Queensland Family History Society (QFHS) has been indexing school admission records in Queensland for many years and I really like being able to access the indexes now through findmypast.com.au. I recently did a search to see if I could find when my father first went to school and where. He started at Greenslopes State School in 1939 and moved to Buranda State School in 1940. I knew about Buranda but not Greenslopes.

What I wasn’t expecting was to find myself in an extensive database on findmypast.com.au! I shouldn’t have been surprised as school records are on open access after 30 years and it’s been more than that since I went to school. I hadn’t realised that my old primary school had published a 50th anniversary book but it has been indexed by QFHS and my name is listed. I must have a look next time I visit Brisbane and go to the QFHS Library.

What I am now wondering is if there are any school photos of my father out there somewhere. I have very few photos of him as a child and would love to see more. My parents, on the other hand, took many photos of me and this one of me all dressed up for my first day of school brings back memories!

While it is good to trace your ancestors further back, don’t forget to also document your own life and that of your parents for future generations. Capture those stories now!

www.shaunahicks.com.au