In Australia there are a number of free Australian death notices websites and without doubt one of the best Australian death notices sites is the Ryerson Index.

The Ryerson Index is an index to death notices appearing in current Australian newspapers. It also includes some funeral notices, probate notices and obituaries. While not all Australian death notices are listed, the Ryerson Index contains over 2,596,891 entries from 178 newspapers (at time of posting) and the indexing is being continuously carried out by a team of volunteers.

One of the advantages of the Ryerson Index compared to some of the other Australian death notices websites is that it contains records going back to the mid 1800′s. Other Australian death notices sites like obits.com.au, obituary.com.au and thelastpost.com.au records are obtained from funeral directors or though contributions by members of the public which limits their content.

The Ryerson Index can be searched in two ways: by name, or by location and once the search is complete it lists the Surname, given name, date of death, age, location, which publication it was printed in and the published date.

Once you have found the death notice you are after, you can receive a photocopy of the death notice by using the Ryerson Index free lookup service. Again this is a volunteer project and don’t expect too much as not all decades are available for lookup.

If you cannot get a copy of a Australian death notices using the Ryerson Index free lookup service, try the Australian newspaper archives website or visit your local library and they might have copies of your State’s papers on microfiche.

Thompson’s Poultry Farm, North Ryde, NSW, Australia. Photo taken late1930′s, early 1940′s.

On the left is my Nana’s brother Albert Thompson and on the right is his father and my Great Grandfather Albert Thompson.

Why does a chicken coup have 2 doors. Because if it had 4 doors it would be a chicken sedan.

When most ladies marry they change their last name to their husband’s last name, which makes tracing their family records fairly easy. But what happens when a daughter changes her first name (not officially) after birth and uses that name on documents?

Don’t get me wrong, I think naming a daughter or a son after their parent’s or grand parent’s first name is a great tradition, but on more than one occasion it has caused me problems.

I know, I know, it might have been easier to change their first name so you know when someone is talking about Sarah Thompson the mother not Sarah Thompson the daughter but it makes it hard when they use the changed name on official occasions and it bears only a little resemblance to the original name.

The last time it happened was just recently when I started searching for the children of my great great great great grand parents John Thompson (born Thomson but that’s another post) and Sarah Ramm.

I was lucky enough to find a collection of scanned images online and within an hour, I had the birth records of all 9 children including a daughter Sarah Ann Thompson.

OK, time to look for marriage and other records for these children. All went well at first, finding most of the records for the sons, but when it came to Sarah Thompson, I could not find a trace.

Looking back through the records, I came across a marriage for a Mary Ann Thompson to a Samuel Starling. I knew we had a Starling in our tree (sorry couldn’t resist it) but as I already had one son married to a Starling, I thought that might be the connection.

Unfortunately the marriage record did not give an age, so I could not work it out from that but the year of marriage and location seemed right. The death record had Mary Ann Thompson’s age at death, which matched Sarah’s birth year.

Was this Sarah Ann Thompson?

Apparently it was! A distant cousin who saw my family tree on Ancestry.com got in contact with me and during a wonderful three hour talk on the phone, I was told Mary Ann Thompson was the Sarah Thompson I was looking for.

Thanks Cousin Lyn

This Thompson family portrait was taken in Australia around 1913, not long after arriving from England. On the left is Amelia Jane Thompson, with daughter Adeline in her arms. Back right is Albert Thompson and the happy looking girl front right is Amelia (Millie) Thompson, my Grandmother, aged about 4. It is one of the earliest photos I have of my Grandmother.

In Australia, I think we are pretty lucky when it comes to trying to trace our family tree for free. For instance, both NSW and Queensland have a free historical birth, death and marriage (BDM) index online, where we can easily find information to help us in our family search.

But eventually there may come a time when you have to purchase a BDM certificate to allow you to trace your family tree further. NSW BDM certificate costs will vary from state to state, with NSW BDM certificates starting from about $28 (at the time of posting).

Another alternative is to get a transcribed copy of the certificate. There are a number of professional BDM transcription agents across Australia who will often be able to transcribe certificates cheaper than purchasing the original.

Being a bit of a scrooge, this was the position I found myself in when I needed to find information on my mum’s parents.

Somehow I had ended up with a copy of my grandfather’s death certificate, so I knew Pop’s details but all I knew about Nana was that her and Pop were married in Ryde, NSW and their 50th Wedding Anniversary was in 1982. Nana’s parents were named Albert and Amelia Thompson and that Nana was born in England somewhere.

Once I had Nana and Pop’s marriage reference number from the NSW BDM index, I then found a NSW BDM transcription agent through Google.

A NSW BDM transription agent can transcribe the following for you: NSW Birth Certificates 1788 – 1909. NSW Marriage Certificates 1788 – 1959 and NSW Death Certificates 1788 – 1979.

When hiring a NSW BDM transcription agent, one good thing is that besides purchasing a full transcription, you can pay for only the “fields” you require. A NSW Full Certificate Transcript cost is $18.00, NSW Partial Certificate Transcripts (5 Fields) is $15.00,  and a NSW Partial Certificate Transcripts (3 Fields) costs $12.00.

For example, if you need a marriage certificate transcribed, you have the choice of 12 different fields.
1.Marriage Date & Place
2. Groom’s Birthplace
3. Groom’s Occupation
4. Groom’s Age
5. Groom’s Father
6. Groom’s Mother
7. Bride’s Birthplace
8. Bride’s Age
9. Bride’s Father
10. Bride’s Mother
11. Witnesses
12. Religion & Minister

I only needed to know 3 fields 7, 9 and 10 and the cost is only $12 instead of $28 for a certificate. Not a bad saving, especially if you need to purchase a few.

And when I received the order, the NSW BDM transcription agent actually sent me all of Nana’s details, fields 7 to 12, even though I didn’t really need them, which I thought was nice.

In Part 5, the final video in our series on How To Create A Free Family History DVD, it’s time to view the final cut.

The look on most faces when you talk about your families’ history? – Bored
The look on people’s faces when you hand them or play your own family history DVD? – Priceless
The smile Grandma would get playing your family history DVD to her friends, showing off her good or bad ancestors?  – Priceless
The cost? Nothing

The methods I have used to create my free family history DVD are pretty basic, but the possibilities are endless. I highly recommend playing around with the different settings and options of each program used, as some of the effects can really make your free family history DVD, all that more professional.

Here’s a quick review of how to create your own family history DVD:

Part 1: Using OpenOffice.org Impress to create a free slideshow.

Part 2: Turn your slideshow into a video using free screen recording software. Add voice narration to your recording.

Part 3: How to edit your video files using free editing video software. Edit movies, fix errors in your slideshow, add music or even add voice overs.

Part 4: Looked at how to burn your video files to DVD, capable of playing on a standard DVD player.

You can view all the video tutorials here.

Hope you enjoyed our series on How To Create A Free Family History DVD.

In Part 4 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at burning your video files to a DVD, capable of playing on a standard DVD player.

Now that we have our slideshow recorded and saved as video files, we need to join them up and convert them to a format a DVD player can read. For this I use a free DVD authoring tool called DVD Flick.

DVD Flick is a free, open-source DVD authoring program that can convert and write almost any video file into a DVD. DVD Flick is designed especially for converting most of your PC video formats to the standard DVD format, so that you can play them on your home DVD player without any problems.

When users want to view video files on their television instead of their computer they can convert the video files and burn them directly onto a DVD. There are many ways to burn video files to DVD, but DVD Flick has to be one of the easiest. It also has a range of other features to make your DVD more professional.

As mentioned in the video here are the links:

Menu Templates

Create Your Own Menu Video

Hope you enjoyed today’s video on DVD Flick and welcome any comments.

In Part 3 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at how to use free video editing software to edit the video recording of our slideshow presentation.

The video editing software program I use is Windows Movie Maker 2. With Movie Maker you can edit movies, fix errors in your slideshow and add music using free video editing software.

If you don’t want to go through all the hassle of creating a slideshow presentation, Movie Maker also allows us to create a video using just photos or images, where we can add voice-overs or music to create a high quality movie, which we look at the end of today’s video.

Windows Movie Maker is a free video editing program which comes with most new PCs but you can download Movie Maker 2.1 for XP here if needed.

Hope you enjoyed this how to use free video editing software video and welcome any comments.

In today’s video, Part 2 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at how to set up and record your slideshow presentation using Camstudio, a free screen recording program.

Free screen recording software lets us record the activity on our screen and saves these as video files. It also allows us to use a microphone to add our own audio narrations to any screen recording.

Once we have recorded our slideshow and saved our video files using screen recording software, we can then edit, add voice overs or music to our slideshow using video creating/editing software.

Just a few tips to make sure the screen recording of your slideshow goes smoothly. Write a script and have that in front of you as you narrate your slideshow. If you have two computers you could even have one using a free auto cue program just like real TV. lol.

Also don’t worry about how many video files you create, as we can easily join them up later. I think we used about 15 video files to create just over one hour of my friends family history DVD.

While we have used a free screen recording or screen capture program to record our slideshow presentation, there are also a number of other ways in which you can use free screen recording software.

You can use free screen recording software to create demonstration videos for any software program or create a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions? You could also also create video tutorials for school and college or even video-based information products you can sell.

Some of the other free screen recording programs you might like to try are, Jing or VirtualDub.

Part 1 of How To Create A Family History DVD can be found here.

Hope you enjoyed today’s video on using free screen recording software and welcome any comments.

In Part 1 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at a few basic tips on just one way to create a slideshow presentation. Once we have completed our slideshow, we can record, add audio and then burn our presentation to create our very own family history DVD.

There are many different ways to create a slideshow that is both informative and entertaining. When you create a slideshow you can include photos, scanned documents such as wedding and birth certificates and screen shots. What types of information you want to include and how far you want to go back is completely up to you.

You can even ask your parents or grandparents to give a talk and record several short audio clips telling their own stories. Later we can add the audio, music and family videos to make our family history DVD. Basically anything and everything.

We used OpenOffice.org Impress to create a slideshow presentation, which is a free software program similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint. Unlike PowerPoint, Impress is available for free and is just one part of a powerful office suite which you can download here.

If you just want a family history Ebook and do not wish to create a slideshow, you are probably better of using OpenOffice.org Writer, but if you want to create both an Ebook and a DVD, we might as well use Impress as we have probably spent more than enough time creating our slideshow already.

Hope you enjoyed this how to create a slideshow video and welcome any comments.