Newspapers for family history

Trove is an excellent resource for family historians, particularly its collection of digitised newspapers and its ability to search pictures and photos held at many of Australia's collecting institutions.

Searching Trove's digitised newspapers

Trove's digitised newspapers are a great way to search for information about your family. They contain notices for births, deaths and marriages, mission and reserve activities, as well as occasional articles and photos.

Name searching on Trove

You can search for people in Trove's digitised newspapers. The example below offers tips and hints on how to search Trove's newspapers. In the example, the name of an Aboriginal man from Victoria "George Patten" is used, however you may use any name you wish.

Step 1: Navigate to Trove's newspapers

Step 2: Type "George Patten" into the search bar, select "Newspapers & Gazettes" and hit enter.

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By searching for "George Patten", we've gotten thousands of results, some of which aren't related to the George Patten we're looking for. This tends to happen a lot with common names.

As we know that George Patten was an Aboriginal man active in Victoria, we can refine the search to only articles containing the words "George Patten" & "Aboriginal".

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We can also limit the search to only include newspapers published in the particular State or Territory George Patten lived in, in this case Victoria.

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More advanced searches are possible including using wildcards and proximity searches, more details are found on the Trove page Constructing a complex search query.