Family History

• Introduction
• Where to begin
• What you can learn
• Other sources

Introduction

The Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC) holds many records that may be of interest to genealogists and family historians. However, the Centre does not hold ‘vital records’ such as birth, death and marriage indexes and church records. For these and other Australian sources we suggest you consult Australian Family History Compendium and Cora Num's Web Sites for Genealogists.

Once you have done your basic research, NBAC may be able to assist in filling in the employment background of your ancestors. It all depends on what your person did for a living.

If they worked for the Commonwealth or state government, including government schoolteachers, policemen, and those employed on public transport, then it is to the Commonwealth or state records, including the Gazettes, to which you must go. For more information, see the Archives of Australia website, which provides links to relevant archival organisations around Australia.

But remember, even though a person may have been in government employment, they may also have been in the relevant trade union, and you may pick up some additional information, especially if they were active in the union.

If your man (and they usually were men) was a manager with one of the big companies, such as Dalgety, CSR Limited or Burns Philp, you have a good chance of tracing his career through the salary books. Through the house magazine, you will be able to get a feel for the nature of his work, and perhaps see the photograph taken at his retirement party.

If, on the other hand, he was a crewmember on one of the Adelaide Steamship ships you won't find him in the company records, but may find him in the relevant union's records. However, you would be much better going either to the crew lists or the General Register of Seamen - see Finding Families: The Guide to the National Archives of Australia for Genealogists.

Where to begin

The first thing to do is to establish for whom your person worked.

The business lists in Sands (eg Sands’ Sydney and Suburban Directory, Sands’ NSW Directory, Sands and McDougalls’ Directory of Victoria) and other similar directories are the best place to start. They list businesses in alphabetical order, in street order, and by trade.

In the case of pastoralists, something like the Pastoral Directories or the ‘Pastoral Section’ in the back of many general directories may be helpful.

Using these, and later the phone books, it is often possible to trace even a small business through to its end, whether it be closure, winding up, merger or take-over.

For publicly listed companies, editions of Jobson’s Investment Digest Year Book of Public Companies in Australia and New Zealand and Jobson’s Mining Year Book will give basic information and, for the earlier twentieth century, so will sources such as The Wild Cat Monthly, published by The Bulletin.

When tracing union membership, the first thing is to work out which union. This can be complicated, but there is help at hand. In 1994 NBAC published Parties to the Award, a publication that sets out the family trees of the trade union movement, that is, of unions that are, or were, federally registered. In the back of the book is an index that shows where the union’s records are held.

These days the records can be in any number of places. For an overview, see Archives of Australia.

For both companies and trade unions the major source for tracking down archival collections is The Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM).

What can you learn

Like everything else in family history research, the records vary. You may learn a great deal, you may confirm what you already knew, or you may find nothing at all, which after all, may be something.

If you are very lucky you may find a full record of employment with all the details, including dates, salary/wages, position, home address and marital status. This is most likely with managers and office workers in the big companies and the skilled unions. In other cases, all that may survive is an undated list of names with unexplained amounts of money against them.

Company house magazines and trade union newspapers may not give specific names, but may provide a great deal of background and atmosphere. Often war service, retirements and death notices are published.

If the person you are looking for is a publican in 20^th century NSW you are in luck. Tooth's - essentially a brewing company – also took a great interest in hotels. For each hotel (whether Tooths or not) there are a series of yellow cards, each covering a decade from the 1920s to the 1970s. Listed on one side of each card are details of the hotel and its structure, on the other side there are details of purchases of beer, spirits and mineral waters, and the names of the licensees, owners, etc. This can be a gold mine for heritage people, as well as family historians.

In the case of the Adelaide Steamship Co, you can be lucky. If your relative was a captain or engineer you may learn the details of individual voyages. And, in the way of these things, you can learn a lot more about the ships than about the crew.

House magazines, such as those for Dalgety, Elders and others can be valuable resources. Elders’ magazine, for example, has photographs and biographies of many of the staff who served in World War I.

In the case of the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), the company archives hold a good deal of information about management, detailed lists of those who leased and purchased land from the company, and details of all those whom the company brought to Australia from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Germany, Chile and China from the 1820s to the 1860s. On the other hand, for locally engaged shepherds, labourers and others who worked for the company before the 1860s, only fragmentary details remain. And there is even less information about the convicts assigned to the company – except for information from the 1828 census and the various musters.

However, if your person was a coal miner in Newcastle between 1875 and 1906, there is a good chance that he worked for the AACo, though there were, by this time, several other big mining companies in the area. NBAC holds the fortnightly pay sheets for all AACo pits for that period and much may be learned from them, though it can be a long, unindexed search.

Other sources

For more information about collections that may be of interest, see our Subject Guides, list of Publications and, most importantly, our List of Holdings.