Ancestry.com.au wish to be there to help you, so they have increased the hours their expert advisers are available to take your calls. Their helpline will now be open 7 days a week.

The quantity of Australian genealogy records online continues to grow, and Ancestry.com.au has contributed to that with their recent additions of destitute children from the Randwick Asylum and New South Wales Publicans’ Licences …

News just in is that the NSW Registry has removed the wildcard search facility from the their interenet index search. This is bad news for all researchers, which of course includes family historians. Ann could be listed as Ann, Anne or Annie. With the wildcard the search provided a search for Ann* and it would bring up all possibilties …

Obituaries are a goldmine of information for genealogists, as they contain a wealth of information about your family. Obituaries Australia is a new website of obituaries published in newspapers, journals, magazines and bulletins. These contain the life stories of Australians from the earliest times to the present.

The National Library of Australia’s digitised newspaper collection ranks up there as one of the most important resources available online for historians and genealogists researching Australian history and people. This spectacular collection continues to grow each month, with more years, and new papers being continuously added …

What does a National Library of Australia eResources card do? Having one of funky little cards allows you to not only request collection items for use onsite in the NLA reading rooms, but also (and more importantly) it gives you access to a wide selection of resources that the NLA subscribes to. These allow you to locate indexes, full-text ejournals, newspapers, websites and guides.

Can you imagine being able to see a photograph of a grave of a relative who died at war? Particularly when there is no chance of being able to visit the burial place. The aim of The War Graves Photographic Project is to photograph every war grave of serving military personnel from WWI to the present day and make these available within a searchable database. But now they’re asking for Australians to help out …

A treasure trove of photographs of Australian diggers taken during the First World War have been discovered in an attic in France, in a major find hailed as ”one of the most important discoveries from World War I” by military historians.

The interest in genealogy is constantly growing, and with it comes the availability of more records … mostly online. Here is a list of ‘must-visit’ sites for those who are reseaching Australians. Newspapers, convicts, cemeteries, military records, photographs, shipping records and more are all available online and for FREE.

The Ryerson Index is a website with over 2,800,000 death, funeral, probate and obituary notices from Australian newspapers. The Ryerson Index team have now put the call out to Family History or Local History Societies who are interested in indexing the notices from their local paper, can you help?

To celebrate Australia Day Ancestry.com.au are giving you FREE, unlimited access to the 2.3 million convicts records that they have online. Records such as Passenger Lists from the First Fleet, Muster rolls and Registers of Pardons dating back to 1788 are all there. Be quick, you only have FREE access until 31 January.

A major new research project delves deep into the past. The secret lives of our Tasmanian convict ancestors are going to be revealed in a major new research project. A collaboration between demographers, historians, epidemiologists and genealogists. By examining birth, death and marriage records and other historical sources …

Australian online data company, FindMyPast.com.au has been busy adding a heap of data (approx. 1,500,000 records) online in the last few weeks. So if you haven’t checked back recently, you might like to recheck.