Connect with your history

March is Women's History Month and we want to help you connect with the women in your ancestry. Use all the tools at your fingertips to advance your Family History research.

Who do you think you are? has made Ancestry.com widely known as a family history research tool. But regardless of what the advertising suggests, it does not have it all.
The library provides you access to various Family History databases, including Ancestry.com, which could broaden your depth of knowledge about members on your tree or even stimulate new branch growth!


FindMyPast has a great range of material covering most countries of the world, however with a particular focus on the records of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Records of women can be found among any of the resources indexed.
Women can be particularly hard to trace  so resources which point directly to women can be a boon. Calais Laceworker Immigrants to South Australia and South Australian Destitute Women are a couple of the indexes available via FindMyPast.

The Biographical Database of Australia is designed to help researchers find one person in thousands, to avoid confusing persons of the same name and to track individuals across time. It aims to gather data from a wide variety of original manuscripts and bring them all together under the individuals name. It's a great starting point, for sifting out those with the same name who are not your ancestor. Don't forget to try both of your female ancestors surnames if you  know them.

British Newspaper Archive has over 18.5 million digitised newspaper pages from 743 UK papers. Browse by place of publication, title and/or date range. Search by name. Newspaper articles can provide amazing detail about peoples lives. They were the social media of the times. If anything happened it was recorded in the papers. Shipping records, arrests, trials, weddings, parties and advertisements can provide clues to locating people. Just have a browse and get a feel for the big news items of the times which can provide clues as to why an ancestor chose to leave all they knew and travel to Australia.

Sydney Morning Herald Archives has digitised reproductions of every edition between the years 1955 and 1995. Use this to find personal notices detailing births, deaths and marriages not yet released by the NSW Registry of Birth, Deaths and Marriages. Birth records are not released to the public until 100 years have passed, marriages must wait 50 years and deaths 30 years. This is not done just to annoy family historians, but for good privacy reasons. So personal notices are a boon!

Ancestry Library Edition boasts over 1.5 million names in over 4000 databases and at that it is the biggest single source of genealogical information. New South Wales, Australia, Wives and children of Irish Convicts, 1825 -1840, Principal women of the Empire: Australia and New Zealand are two resources dealing specifically with women, however females are documented in all other resources as well.

Come in to one of the Sutherland Shire Libraries to search and see the original documents supplied via the library's subscription.