Record Atlas
46 FamilySearch collections · 5 archives · 248 places · 1776–2005

Australia

Where the records of Australia are, who holds them, and what it costs to look. 18,155,053 indexed records reachable through FamilySearch alone.

Where to start in Australia

3 of the 4 checked sources here can be opened tonight. 2are free images with no account. 1is an index with no images. 1is paid or part-paid. On top of that, 9 worldwide services reach Australia without a subscription.

1 more institution is listed here and has never been checked — nobody has opened it, written to it, or found out what it holds. They are on the map as grey because that is what they are, and the honest reading of this page is 3 known-open, 1 unknown.

Write to National Archives of Australia — RecordSearch, Queensland Historical BDM Index for what is not online. FamilySearch has 46 collections covering it, running 1776–2005, 18,155,053 indexed records. One piece of this ground is mapped for jurisdiction, so the atlas can say whose archive held it in a given year.

248 places placed, 68 volumes walked. Open Australia on the map, or tell us what is missing.

Whose archive this ground was

Record regions mapped in Australia — which empire held the ground, and therefore which archive holds its paper.

The archives

  • Catholic Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust — Brisbane (cemsearch) unsurveyed Brisbane, Australia

    The burial register search for the Roman Catholic cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Brisbane, Nudgee among them — NINE cemeteries. Returns register number, cemetery, name, birth, death, interment date and PLOT NUMBER. It is NOT in the Brisbane City Council grave search, because these are not council cemeteries: a family buried here is invisible to the council portal and to the aggregators that copy it. Queried by POST to `query.php?type=Deceased` with `CemeteryCode=%` and `SectionCode=%` — passing «All» returns nothing. Used from the Falco family archive, where it produced five burials that corrected two death dates carried from a family tree.

  • Findmypast paid

    Commercial. The strongest British and Irish collection, including parish registers licensed from diocesan archives and the 1921 census of England and Wales. BT 27 IS NOT ONE FORM AND ITS COLUMNS ARE NOT A CONSTANT. The outward passenger lists were re-drawn across the series, so a field present in one piece proves nothing about another and the era has to be checked before a row is planned around it. Sampled by the Luwinski archive: the 1907 form has NO «last address in the United Kingdom» column at all and buckets ages by nationality instead; the 1937 and 1939 form — printed «P.M. 21», columns (1)–(9) — carries last UK address at (6), country of last permanent residence at (8) and country of intended future permanent residence at (9); a 1951 piece is a typed US military transport manifest filed inside BT 27 with none of the Board of Trade form left. ACROSS EVERY REVISION SEEN, none gives an address in the DESTINATION country — the finest is a country and nothing below it, so «where in Australia did they settle» is not a question this series answers.

  • National Archives of Australia — RecordSearch free Canberra, Australia

    Immigration and naturalisation files, service records and alien registration — including the wartime files of European arrivals. NO DEEP LINK IS POSSIBLE, AND THAT IS THE FINDING. Tried on 2026-09-30: RecordSearch runs on a server session and says so itself — «you are no longer in an active session… a link or bookmark referred to an expired session… RecordSearch requires cookies to be enabled to store a session identifier». A URL carrying a surname cannot be handed to somebody; it lands them on an expiry notice rather than a result. So this row deliberately has no `deepLink` where Cognomix and others do, and anything that wants to send a reader here has to send them to the search screen to type it themselves. Access is genuinely free — the site offers «search as a guest» without an account — which is why it stays `free`.

  • Queensland Historical BDM Index index Brisbane, Australia

    Queensland's historical births, deaths and marriages index. Free to search; certificates are charged. Every Australian state runs its own.

  • Trove free Canberra, Australia

    The National Library of Australia's newspaper and gazette archive. Free and full-text. Most titles stop at 1954 for copyright, which is the usual rule of thumb — BUT TWO EXCEPTIONS REACH MUCH LATER AND ARE EASY TO MISS: THE CANBERRA TIMES IS DIGITISED 1926-1995, and the COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA GAZETTE 1901-1973, whose naturalisation and citizenship lists carry name, street address and date. Those two make Trove usable for post-war arrivals that the 1954 rule would rule out. NOTE THAT THE SEARCH NORMALISES SPELLING — two different spellings of one surname can return an identical result set — SO TROVE CANNOT BE USED AS A SPELLING TEST. The v3 API needs an X-API-KEY header and does not serve article text at ordinary key level; the public article page carries the OCR.

And 12 worldwide providers reach Australia too — the full list.

46 FamilySearch collections

Grouped by the ground each one covers, nationwide. A free account opens the images; some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Australia — nationwide 46

20 more collections, contributed

A directory David assembled, sorted by what kind of record each one is. Read this differently from the rest of the page. The descriptions are his, not an archive's catalogue, and nobody here has opened the volumes behind them. Every link was tried on 2026-09-20 and answered; the ones that did not are not listed.

Civil registration and vital records 6
Probate, land and notarial 6
Military and wartime 7
Immigration and emigration 7
Cemeteries and burials 1

248 places, 68 volumes

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