If your ancestors migrated to Australia from England you can usually find out much more about them by tracing them and their families back in England.

Civil registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages

Birth, marriage, and death certificates are available for England and Wales from the beginning of civil registration in 1837. Various indexes are available on microfiche and online which allow searching by a single name without parents’ or spouses’ names to cross-reference with. Once you find the reference you can order the certificate at the General Register Office. You may need to order more than once until you get the one that relates to your ancestor.

Censuses

The census is a unique snapshot of the family at a specific point in time, taken every ten years and kept for future generations. It lists everyone living in the household, their age, sex, relationship to the head of the household, occupation, and where they were born.

Finding your ancestor in successive censuses back to childhood can give you unparalleled family information such as the names, ages, occupations and birthplaces of parents and siblings. Sometimes other family members were present, such as grandparents, in-laws, aunts and uncles, cousins, and visitors and servants with significant surnames! You can also see who their neighbours were.

The first census that recorded individuals was in 1841. Ages for adults were rounded down to the nearest 5 in most cases, and place of birth was reduced to “this county or not”. Later years added progressively more questions to the census return. The most recently released census is the 1901. The 1911 census will be released in 2012.

Convict trial records

Trial records for convicts sentenced to transportation to the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land can give interesting details about the trial and the crime, including accomplices and witnesses. Some of these records are online, such as those of the Old Bailey in London, and others are available in Australia on microfilm.

Passenger lists

Outgoing passenger lists from the UK can supplement the limited information available on incoming passenger lists to Australia. The passenger lists for unassisted immigrants into Sydney are only very slowly being indexed, and even when a name is found it can be difficult to determine whether it is your ancestor as there may only be a title and surname, eg Miss Smith. The British passenger lists often contain more detail such as country of origin and first names, allowing a more reliable match.

These lists are progressively being digitised from 1890 to 1960 and are available on FindMyPast.