Births, deaths and marriages   Tags: births, burial, cemetery, certificates, deaths, district_registers, family, genealogy, history, marriages, probate, sa_memory, state_library_of_south_australia, weddings, wills  

Birth, Death and Marriage records are a rich source of information about your family. The information you will find in an index or on the certificate itself will depend on the time and place the event was registered, but by checking a few different sources you might be able to establish:

• The date and place of the birth, death or marriage
• The names of the father and mother of the person you are researching
• Their maiden name
• The ages and birthplace of their father and mother, which can help you keep tracing your family backwards through time 
• Any previous children they might have had

Indexes to birth, death and marriage records for South Australia and interstate are held at the State Library. These indexes are available in various formats including CD ROMS, books and microfiche, and can only be searched onsite. Please note that only indexes are held. The actual records of a particular person's birth, death or marriage are held at Birth, Death and Marriage Registry Offices in each state. You will need to contact the Birth, Death and Marriage Registry Office directly and pay a fee to obtain the actual certificate.

These pages will help you discover how to start searching.

Until March 2012 the indexes to South Australian births, deaths and marriages were not available online.

Recently, Genealogy SA published extracts from the indexes online. The information is equivalent to indexes published online by most Australian  states. Information about these and other databases can be found at the Genealogy SA website.

The full indexes are available on CDROM and available in the State Library of South Australia, many public libraries and other state libraries across Australia. The Library is open daily, however, if you are unable to visit, we invite you to submit a query via our Ask Us Service.

Newspapers are a rich resource which is very useful for augmenting information from official sources. Often newspapers will give names of parents or other family members in the Personal Notices. For more information on Newspapers, click here.

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