Family History Centre resources

Ancestry Library Edition is one of the largest genealogical collections available today, with coverage of the US, UK, Canada, Europe, Australia and many other places around the world.  Accessible records include census data, vital church and immigration records, births, deaths and marriage records, and directories. You can search by geographic region, which makes it easier to focus on relevant ancestral records.

Findmypast is a world leader in online genealogy.

Findmypast UK has access to complete birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales dating back to 1837. Findmypast UK has partnerships with archives and family history societies to create an extensive collection of millions of records from England, Scotland and Wales, such as national census records and smaller unique census records dating back to the late 1790s. You can access an assortment of British military records, Welsh parish records and school registers from Scotland.

Findmypast Australasia searches over 50 million records for Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. There are over 700,000 cemetery records across Australia, electoral role records, over 15 million government records, including government gazettes, police gazettes and blue books, religious records, a large collection of Military records, and over 10 million directories and almanacs.

The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection.

The British Library's collection of historical newspapers is one of the wonders of the world: it contains newspapers from 1603 to the present day, from both Britain and further afield. There are over 600,000 bound volumes of newspapers (occupying 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, of shelving) and over 300,000 reels of microfilm (occupying a further 13 kilometres, or 8 miles, of shelving). Until now, the only way to view these newspapers was to visit the British Library, and, of course, it was not possible to search them.

Almost 1000 convicts are known to have been assigned to the Kiama district. The FHC has available a fully searchable listing along with a number of convict biographies. You can read about some of the convict stories here

We have a full set of births, deaths and marriages records from the Kiama Court House.

A fully searchable index to property transactions 1825-1960 in the town-site of Kiama based on the original town plan.

RootsIreland offers a unique database of more than 22 million Irish records. It contains data from 34 county genealogy centres on the island of Ireland.

The main sources on the site are Irish Catholic and other church records of baptisms, marriages and deaths which are the most important source for tracing Irish ancestry.

Use ScotlandsPeople to access a wide range of records kept by the Scottish Government, churches and courts of law.

Six categories of records are indexed by personal name: civil registers, church registers, census returns, valuation rolls, legal records and poor relief and migration records.

You can search them free of charge and pay for copies using credits, which the Family History Centre will facilitate. The exceptions to this are the Highlands and Islands Emigration records (within the 'Poor relief and migration records' category) and the 1881 LDS transcribed census records (within the 'Census returns' category).