Looking for relatives in Sydney, Australia

I am looking for family in Sydney, Australia. My mother came to the US and married my dad in the late 1940s. She got hit by a car and killed in 1952 in California, USA. I have never met my family in Australia. I had a grandma named Doris Eva Smith who used to write to me and my mother's sister Marian Edwards used to write but no one has written for several years now. They lived in Sydney, Australia. Marian Edwards had 3 kids: Donna, Belinda and Sharon Edwards. I know I had a Uncle named Victor Smith. I so want to connect with my family. I have always felt as though I was missing a part of me not knowing them. Thank you for any help you can give me.

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Permalink Reply by Tonia (from NAA) on March 5, 2013 at 14:43

Hi Deborah

I am not sure whether the records of the National Archives of Australia will be of use to you. The records about people that are in our collection were created by the Australian government, and document an individual’s interaction with the government, such as defence service records, assisted immigration records and naturalisation records.

If you are looking for information on where your family members lived and what they did, the National Library of Australia has historical electoral rolls on microfilm in their Newspapers and Microforms reading room. These electoral rolls list people who are registered to vote at Commonwealth, State, Territory and Local Government elections and referenda. Electoral rolls contain the name, address, occupation (omitted after 1983) and gender of each elector. An Australian Electoral Commission number is also included. If you cannot come to Canberra to search these records, you may need to engage a research agent to help you search the electoral rolls, you may find one willing to help on our fact sheet 40 www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs40.aspx. The National Library has a vast array of family history resources that may be useful to you in your search, see http://www.nla.gov.au/family-history-sources.

Regarding information about when they may have been born or died, this information is not held by the National Archives. The registration of births, deaths and marriages is done by the State governments (the National Archives is the archive of Federal government records), and the records are held by the Registrar in each state. You can find a list of contact details for each of the Births, Deaths and Marriages registries on our fact sheet 89 www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs89.aspx. I recommend you contact the registrar in the State in which you think they lived for more information on how to search their records. Another source of information is Trove www.trove.nla.gov.au, where you can search digitised newspapers for mention of your relatives. You may also be able to find your relatives’ in death notices indexed in the Ryerson Index http://www.ryersonindex.org/, which is an index of death notices in Australian newspapers, with a strength in information about people in New South Wales (of which Sydney is the capital city).