Australian BMD

[maureenjoan]

Does Australia have similar facility to UK - i.e. BMD Indexes available to view on line up to recent years (UK upto 2005/6)??  From what I can find it looks like this information is not available.  Is that right?  How do Australian Family Historians check things up to date if info is not readily available?  Any advice would be welcome - especially births circa 1943.

[Neil Todd]

Hi, Australia does not have a single BMD but instead each State has  their own records. Some are free to view on line others are pay. But, and this is a biggy, we have stringent privacy laws and in the case of births no information is available on possible living individuals, IE a 100 year rule is applied that is births are at present only available prior to 1911.

In the case of Marriages it is 1961 and Deaths 1981. The Laws of the Commonwealth of Australia were set up in 1901 at Federation and allowed for the States to maintain their own Judicial system under individual Governors.

I know, it makes it tough to check records for us family Historians but thems the breaks. We have in some cases been lucky as births may have been published in Newspapers and we can check these up to 1954 I think, via TROVE. This is our national online database of Historical Newspapers.

Hope this helps

Neil

[maureenjoan]

Many thanks for that - I thought it was different to the UK.  Makes it really difficult if you are looking for possible half siblings that may be out there due to marriage breakups or adoptions etc.    I have been quite successful finding family for several people who were either adopted or in the Care system in the UK.  And now another one has come up but sadly she is Australian so guess there is not much I can do to help. 

Thanks anyway for letting me know the 'rules'.

[Neil Todd]

Hi, Maybe if you post who you are after we may still be able to help. There are lots of very clever people on RC OZ who know methods to circumvent the problems.

Neil

[deeiluka]

Each state is different however.

If you visit http://www.coraweb.com.au/bdmau.htm  you'll be able to see what is available for the different states, although not every state has an online index. For example, South Australia has births to 1928, but they are not at this stage online.

However, as Neil stated, some of us have resources to help.


Dee   

[mum mum]

Hi
There are other options for searching for living people, helps if you know their names though. Such as writing letters to Newspapers in each State, a lot of papers have a column devoted to finding missing people.
A death certificate for an individual should list their children, if the death was after 1981 you may find it on the Ryerson index, see resources page.
Our electoral rolls are available online up until 1980 so we may be able to find a person there and give you an idea of where they were living.

mum mum

[maureenjoan]

Many thanks to you all for your suggestions.  I think I need to go back to the drawing board and check with my friend to see if she has any more details that we can follow through on.