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I don’t know if Clint Eastwood ever actually said this. When I saw it I thought “that’s right!”. There are no guarantees in genealogy. Or in life!

I am often asked “if I do ______ will it give me the information I need?” and the answer is always “I don’t know”. It might, or it might not. There are no guarantees in genealogy.

The toaster will come with a guarantee for a specified period. A subscription to Ancestry or FindMyPast or any other paid website will not. Nor will membership in a family history society. Nor a book you are tempted to buy. Nor a CD.

The record with the information you are looking for may be in there, or it may not. It may exist, or not. It may exist but not in the form/place/date you expect.

Even if it’s not there, that is information you can use as well. Think about the possible reasons that it would not be there.

The only guarantee I can give you is that if you don’t try anything new you won’t find anything new.

If you are not a subscriber to the newsletter of State Records NSW then you should be! 

News of new online indexes, changes to indexes, and how to use the website in general is being issued on a continuous basis, and the changes they are making may mean finding your ancestor after many years of being unable to find him/her.

A recent example is the merging of the immigration indexes. Previously the assisted immigration indexes for NSW were divided into three separate indexes, with additional indexes for other geographical areas that were part NSW at the time. If, in your enthusiasm, you missed searching one of the indexes you may miss your ancestor altogether.

Now, all these indexes have been combined into one, although you can search the old indexes individually if you wish. If he’s there you can’t NOT find him! (unless your spelling is too specific).

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I am an occasional indexer for FamilySearch, about which I have written before. There is an enormous number of projects to be indexed from all over the world. You can see the current list here.

One of the projects currently available for indexing is the Sydney Cemetery Inscriptions, a collection of index cards for cemeteries including Rookwood, the largest cemetery in Sydney and probably Australia. Name, age, date of death and cemetery name is the minimum information that I have so far seen, although there is capacity for birth date,  parents’ names and spouse’s name.

FamilySearch indexing is the easiest to use indexing software I’ve ever seen. The screen is split between a digital image of the document being indexed and the form to be filled in. Many fields give a list of common names, placenames, etc, which help enormously if the entry is hard to read. There is a lot of help available, on the screen and on the website. The biggest advantage is that each batch is indexed twice, with a third person to adjudicate if there are any discrepancies, so you do not have the pressure of getting it perfect.

A batch consists of a variable number of entries to be indexed, depending on the document. These cemetery batches only have 12 or 15 cards to a batch that I have seen so far, so you can whip through one quickly. I used to index Irish Civil Registration indexes and they had 375 names to a page!

The sooner we get this indexed the sooner it will be available to all of us. For more information or to sign up click here.