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This collection from Adam Matthew Digital captures the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of people living at the edges of the Anglophone world from 1650-1920. It ranges across the various colonial frontiers of North America before touching on the settlers and indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

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This resource focuses on European emigration to the United States, Canada, and Australasia during the 19th and 20th centuries (1800-1980). This resource includes personal diaries, letters, travel journals and scrapbooks supplemented by original maps, watercolours, engravings, objects, emigration pamphlets, shipping papers and rare printed material. Convict shipping logs to Australia in the 1850s. Immigration to the US, Australasia and Canada and the movement of indentured Asian labourers. By Adam Matthew Digital.

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For use in the Library

Family history database offering onsite access to records from archives around the world, covering genealogical areas such as:

  • Census & Voter Lists
  • Births, Deaths & Marriages
  • Immigration & Emigration
  • Military
  • Directories & Member Lists
  • Court, Land, Wills & Financial
  • Dictionaries, Encyclopedias & Reference
  • Stories & Publications
  • Newspapers & Periodicals
  • Photos & Maps
  • Maps, Atlases & Gazetteers
  • Ancestry World Tree and Message Boards.

Document supply available.

Ancestry Library Edition access reverted to ‘For use in the Library only’ on 1 January 2022.

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Resource: Freely available
Assisted immigrants arriving in Sydney and Newcastle 1844-59, Moreton Bay 1848-59 and Port Phillip 1839-51. The term 'assisted immigrant' refers to those people whose passage was subsidised or paid for through one of the several assisted immigration schemes which operated to New South Wales from the United Kingdom and other countries. View record page
Resource: Freely available
Research guides on topics such as 'Australian and New Zealand Built Ships', 'Child Migration', 'Coastal Shipping', 'Convict Ships', 'First Fleet', 'Immigration - Steamships and Passenger Liners', 'Seafaring Ancestors', 'Shipwrecks' and more. View record page
Resource: Freely available
Naturalisation had been a responsibility of the individual colonies until 1903 when it was taken over by the Commonwealth. As a consequence, the National Archives holds citizenship records for all states from 1904. However, the National Archives also holds naturalisation records for the Colony of Victoria and the Province of South Australia for the period from 1848 to 1903. Naturalisation records for New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania before 1904 are held by the respective State government archives. View record page
Resource: Freely available
Documents may include application forms, passenger lists, entry permits and accommodation records and naturalisation. Records are available if they are more than 30 years old. For arrivals by sea betwen 1926 and 1950, you can search the Freemantle passenger lists. Most passenger vessels from Europe made Fremantle, Western Australia, their first port. View record page
Resource: Freely available
An alphabetical index to all the microfilm shipping registers the National Archives hold. The most important of these registers are the Australian Registers of British Ships (1834-1982). The online index is searched by entering the whole or part of a ship's name and/or year of voyage and basic information is then provided about the ship, namely, the official number, the year built, the port number, the National Archive microfilm roll number and which National Archive office in Australia holds the record. View record page
Resource: Freely available
The Australian National Shipwrecks Database covers all known shipwrecks in Australian waters and can provide details of the ships voyage, the wreck location, the features of the vessel, crew and passengers. The number of shipwrecks listed totals 7664 including: NSW (2047), VIC (797), TAS (1116), QLD (1244), SA (774), WA (1466), NT (153) and Cocos Islands (2). View record page
Resource: Freely available
Contains shipping and passenger information for Australia and, to an increasing extent, New Zealand. Information is derived primarily from historical newspapers and state and national archive material. The website has the following shipping indexes: Arrivals, Departures, Shipwrecks, Ship's Captains, Passengers and crew, Vessel index , Historical background, Vessel related reports and diaries, journals and reports. There are also some pioneer biographies and ship images. Although there are a significant number of entries found here, it is just a small fraction of the total from 1788 to 1968. This website contains almost all of the convict ships, as well as most of the ships that arrived in Sydney before 1825 where passengers were known to be on board. One area that is particularly difficult for researchers is the coastal movement of people, as many of these are not listed in official records. For these types of records, the best place to look is in the 'Shipping Intelligence' columns of the newspapers of the time. View record page
Resource: Freely available
A list of ships travelling into Australian and New Zealand waters between 1788 and 1990. Contains information about log book sources and places each ship visited. Files scanned as part of the ACRE (Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions across Earth) data rescue effort. View record page
Resource: Freely available
This website, developed by Mary-Anne Warner, covers the movement of mariners and passengers into Sydney from NSW State Records Shipping Inward lists from the Shipping Master's Office. View record page
Resource: Freely available
The Miramar Ship Index (domiciled in the suburb of Miramar, Wellington, New Zealand) is an historical database listing both merchant powered ships of about 100 gross register tons and above and naval ships of even smaller tonnage displacement; and also composite, iron & steel sailing ships. View record page
Resource: Freely available
Access to CORIOLIS: the interdisciplinary journal of maritime studies, Whalemen's shipping list and Merchants' transcript (American whaling vessels throughout the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries), American offshore whaling voyages database (information from about all known American offshore whaling voyages from the 1700s to the 1920s), Fall River crew lists, San Francisco Shanghaiers and a Maritime Search Engine that searches across multiple databases. View record page
Resource: Freely available
The National Trust Names database contains information on the size and geographical distribution of 25,630 family names. The information is based on the findings of a project based at University College London (UCL) that is investigating the distribution of surnames in Great Britain, both current (1998) and historic (1881). View record page
Resource: Freely available
'Using the shipping lists from the records of the companies held at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Pure Merinos and Others records names of these newly arrived employees and, wherever possible, details of their ages, occupations and wages. The book also includes sailing and arrival dates of the ships on which they came, tonnage, captain and details of significant cargo, especially animal stock.' View record page
Resource: Freely available
NSW State Records offers online indexes and online 'microfilm' copies of the following assisted immigrants records it holds : (1) Assisted immigrants arriving at Port Phillip, 1839-51 (2) Assisted immigrants arriving in Sydney and Newcastle, 1844-59 (3) Assisted immigrants arriving at Moreton Bay (Brisbane), 1848-59 (4) Assisted immigrants arriving in Sydney, 1860-79 and 1880-96 The term 'assisted immigrant' refers to those people whose passage was subsidised or paid for through one of the several assisted immigration schemes which operated to New South Wales from the United Kingdom and other countries. View record page
Resource: Freely available
This index contains the names of some passengers who paid their own fare and some assisted immigrants. There are over 9000 entries to search. View record page
Resource: Freely available
A NSW State Records index that lists some 5,500 people born outside the British Empire who became naturalised in NSW between 1834 and 1903. View record page
Resource: Freely available
A partial index of ships arriving in NSW (1837-1899), Queensland (1840-1915), Victoria (1837-1899), South Australia (1836-1860), Western Australia (1829-1889)and New Zealand (1839-1905). Includes convict transports (1788-1868). Produced by Margaret Bauer and Nancy Campbell. View record page