Research with Trove

Trove can reveal notices, advertisements, reports, photographs and books. OCR makes discovery faster, but it can misread names and dates.

Make a start

1. Search broadly

   Try a name, initials, address, business or phrase, then add a place and date range.

2. Try variants

   Search spelling variants, abbreviations and likely OCR mistakes.

3. Open the scan

   Read the page image, not only the OCR snippet, and identify publication title, date and page.

4. Cite precisely

   Save the persistent Trove URL with the publication title, date, page and article/item details.

Read context

A newspaper report reflects its publisher, purpose and time. Treat it as evidence to compare with other records, especially where names, allegations or family relationships are concerned.

If a result is unreadable or incomplete, record the problem rather than silently correcting it. A different issue, title or repository may preserve a better copy.

Search a person, place or building

Choose Newspapers & Gazettes and start with the family name, business name or address. Try exact phrases, initials, a maiden name and alternate spellings. Limit by publication date or place after an initial broad search; a district story may appear in a newspaper published elsewhere. Search an estate name or a neighbour when a street was renumbered.

Open the article and the page image, then read the surrounding columns and later issues. Family notices, advertisements, court reports, tenders and sale descriptions can reveal different parts of a story. Save the article’s persistent link, newspaper title, date and page with your notes.

When an online search finds nothing

Browse a known newspaper issue by date if the name is absent from results: old type, damaged pages and unfamiliar names can defeat optical character recognition. Try a distinctive word from the event, the school or a nearby town. Coverage varies by newspaper and date; an absence of results does not establish that nothing was published.

Ask Wingecarribee Public Libraries or the Society’s research centre about local newspaper holdings, indexes, family files and other collections that are not searchable on Trove. Take the date range and the newspaper titles you have already checked.

A worked example

This example is fictional and illustrates a research method, not a real historical finding.

Find a business when the name is hard to read

Suppose you are looking for a fictional shop called Brown & Sons. Search the name in quotation marks, then try Brown, the locality and a narrower date range; also try an address or initials and spelling variants.

Open a promising newspaper page and read the advertisement in context. Save the persistent item link, newspaper title, date and page. An advertisement shows what was advertised at that time; it does not by itself establish when the business began or ended.

Useful resources

• Trove - Notices, reports, advertisements, people and place context.
• Wingecarribee Public Libraries Local Studies - Local newspapers, photos, rate books, cemetery registers and council material.

Explore the full research resource directory · Search the Society library catalogue · Browse Society newsletters

Common questions