Findmypast Created a Beginner's Guide to their Records

Findmypast Australia and New Zealand is a family history and genealogy website with over 8 billion historical records. They realize that trying to sort through 8 billion records to find what you are looking for can be a bit overwhelming. To help make things easier, Findmypast Australia and New Zealand created a Complete Beginner’s Guide to Findmypast’s records (and how to search for them.)

The first thing Findmypast points out is the life event records that all genealogists search for. This category of records is commonly known as “BDMs”. It includes birth certificates, marriage certificates, and death certificates. They are also called vital records, because they record the most important events in your ancestor’s life. The “BDMs” are an excellent place for a beginning genealogist to start.

Findmypast’s Life Events records include: Baptism, banns, marriage, and burial records. These records can help a beginning genealogist learn more about their ancestor’s lives. Each record holds information about your ancestor. In addition, these types of records may also include names of your relative’s spouse, parents, female relative’s maiden names, the ancestor’s birthplace, occupation, and more.

Before civil registration, “BDMs” were kept in parish registers. Findmypast has a collection of records called Church & Religion It is a smaller collection than their Life Events collection, but is still a useful source of information.

There are more than 40,500 Australian and New Zealand church records, including The Australia Lutheran 1913-1966 records, which provide information on specific events and people in Australian churches in the form of notices, including many marriages, deaths, and obituaries. The collection includes the Sydney Diocesan Directory, the Queensland Freeman journal, and more.

Another category of records that beginning genealogists should take a look at is Findmypast’s Travel & Migration records. Between 1836 and 1914, millions of Europeans migrated to the United States in search of jobs and a better life. Others traveled to Australia and other parts of the world.

The Beginner’s Guide that Findmypast put together has a good summary of several other categories of records. In addition, the Guide includes step by step instructions about how to search the records. There are a few different kinds of searches a genealogist may find useful. Findmypast explains what each search can reveal, and includes an image of the search engine box that corresponds to each type of search.

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