Family History Class Notes – Death Certificates, Australia – 101

In previous classes, we looked at birth and marriage certificates in Australia. We also used our own birth certificate to gather clues to assist us to step back to another generation in our family history.

However, birth certificates seldom help with finding our ancestors’ death certificates. Occasionally if one of the parents is deceased at the registration of that birth the fact may be noted on a certificate but not always.

Death certificates are probably the most difficult of the three events of birth, death or marriage to track down. The information on them may be the most unreliable too. The person whose death is being registered may not be known by the informant or little more than their name. The fact that they were married or had children or the names of their parents may not be known.

There is no central place for the registration of deaths in Australia. Each state has a Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in their capital city. Until recently the deceased’s family and friends were responsible to register a death.

Now the undertaker needs to supply information on a death to obtain a license to bury or cremate. Once people were able to bury where they wished, but after the beginning of registration of deaths, all burials were to take place in a designated burial ground. The friends and family had a specific time to register a death with the Registrar’s Office-usually at the local Court House, but for various reasons, this didn’t always happen.

In recent years each of the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and marriages in each state has built a website where you can search for free their indexes. These can be found at:-

 

https://www.familyhistory.bdm.qld.gov.au/

https://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/

https://www.justice.tas.gov.au/bdm/home

https://www.sa.gov.au

https://bdm.justice.wa.gov.au

https://nt.gov.au/law/bdm/search

However, just as there are a hundred years for births and a fifty-year rule for marriage certificates, there is a thirty-year rule for deaths. That means you cannot get a death certificate for a death that took place less than thirty years ago.

Be aware that each of these indexes in each state is a little different. For example in the death index for Queensland, the actual date of death is given but in New South Wales only the year of registration is given.

On each of these indexes, the name of the deceased, date or year of registration of the death is given as well as the parent’s names if known.

Of all the certificates, the information on a death certificate is possible the most unreliable. The informant of the death may have known very little about the deceased particularly the names of parents, spouse or children. For this reason alone it is important to get further documents that may confirm the information given on a death certificate.

Just as you may not be able to find a reference in the indexes for a birth or marriage you may not be able to find a death registration.  Sometimes this is because you are not using the spelling of the names used at the registration. However, the death may not have been registered in the first place.

Remember you are looking for information for the death event. There are many records that give you information on a person’s death. Some of these you may be able to get even if the death took place less than thirty years ago. You may find a death certificate; death certificate transcription; Church burial register; Church/Civil burial memorabilia; church/civic funeral order of service; photographs and/or video of funeral/burial service; photographs and/or video of interment of ashes; undertakers records/municipal burial records; newspaper death/funeral notice; obituary; newspaper memorial notice; memorial cards; memorial plaque or headstone; inquest report; original and /or copy of will and testament; probate/letters of administration notice/ family register in bible or prayer book; letters and diaries/ oral and personal recollections by family and friends.

This is not a definitive list and you could possibly think of others. You will not be able to get all these records for each death. They are just a guide.

I have used the above list to make myself a datasheet to put in my files on each individual.

 

A pdf download of the data-sheet can be found on this website under the Resources and Examples Tab.

Many of these records you may find in family papers. I have found a number of these for my mother’s death and have entered them into my data sheet below.

If someone shares these documents with you, please record them as the source of the document with their name, date, and address, on your document copy. Back or front depending on your skills and preference. Just because you now have a copy, please remember this is not your document to scan and put up on the Internet.

It is good family history manners even if you create your own document, such as a transcription, which is quite legal, you should get permission from the original owner to share the information and give them credit for originally sharing with you. Later down the track, they are then likely to share more with you, and you will feel comfortable sharing with them, as you will expect the same courtesy.

Now just a word of warning about using indexes. They do not have the full information a certificate has. If you only use an index make sure it is the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages website. Transcription errors often creep into copies, which can put your research away off track.

Continue to be very careful and diligent in your research.

 

 

 

Family Heirloom – The Photograph

Perhaps you have heard ‘that a photograph is worth a thousand words’.

Then let me write for you, at least a thousand words, about this photograph. The who, when, where, how and why this photograph was taken. The story behind this ‘one second in time’.

Perhaps I should tell you I hold the original photograph, and shared it some forty years ago with my surviving paternal aunts, giving them all a copy of the only known photograph of their father, who had died, when most of them were only small children. This above photograph has been clipped from the original photograph I shared.

It was shared with love, but now I find it thrown about the Internet like a bit of flotsam on a boiling sea. Sometimes with the correct name, and sometimes not. Sometimes placed in the right family, and sometimes not.

Let us start with the who. This is my paternal grandfather, William Growcock, born 1867 in Ireland.

No ‘T’ as a second initial, or ‘James’ as a second name. Just plain ‘William’, nothing else. How do I know this? I have been researching this family for over forty years, and long ago I interviewed his wife, children and first cousins about the family, which I followed up with documentation. I know that this family in Ireland, for at least two hundred years and perhaps more, and on all family lines, called the eldest son ‘William’, without exception.

It pains me to see the added ‘T’ or ‘James’ with his name.

Where does this ‘T’ come from? It is found on the Internet at the NSW Marriage Index linked to several subscription sites, and has been for unknown reasons incorrectly added to his marriage entry. On his original marriage certificate held at the Registrar General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney, there is no ‘T’, nor is there on the original index held there at that office. The ‘T’ only exists on the corrupted modern computer index, on the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages website, and on some linked subscription sites.

‘William James’ is my father. There is no other person of that name in the family, anywhere.

Now let us look at where this photograph was taken. It was taken on the family farm at Tygalgah on the Tweed River in northern New South Wales. In the original photograph, ‘William’, known to family and friends as ‘Bill’, was dressed in the obligatory ‘flannel’ and ‘kerchief’ of the Australian farmer of that time.( If he had still been in Ireland, he would have been wearing a long shirt with a kilt.) He was carrying out a daily morning chore of feeding the hens and rooster, outside their ‘chook-pen’.

When was the photo taken? We know it was taken in 1925, as other photos in my possession, taken at the same time, were notated on the back.

The photograph was taken by Bill’s daughter, not yet twelve years of age, with her new Brownie camera.

In 1900 the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a low-priced, point and shoot, hand-held camera. This camera was a simple black, rectangular box, covered in imitation leather with nickeled fittings. To take a ‘snap shot’ ,all one had to do was to hold the camera waist high, line up the subject and turn a switch. It was reasonably affordable and the company sold many thousands all over the world.

After World War I this camera was heavily marketed to children and advertisements were placed in popular magazines. Children under the age of sixteen were also urged to join the Brownie Camera Club. A camera owner could buy a six-exposure film cartridge that could be loaded in daylight. Kodak also promised for a small fee to develop the film for the camera owner rather than them having to invest in materials and a dark room. You could post the film to them, or leave it at an agent.

How did Bill Growcock’s daughter come to be the owner of this wonderful camera?

Bill Growcock was the eldest son of a family of eight in Ireland. Although he wasn’t the only one in the family, who had married, he was the only one, who had a family of his own,at that time, which he was very proud of.

He had arranged to have some professional photographs taken of his two older daughters, before the War, and sent them home to his mother in Ireland.

By the 1920’s, Bill Growcock and his family had moved to a dairy farm at Tygalgah, but life there was tough, as not only had the Tweed River flooded their farm every year, but the dreaded ‘cattle tick’ had virtually brought many of the farmers to near ruin.

The Growcocks with a family of five children by 1925, although not destitute were struggling to make ends meet on the farm, as were all their neighbours.

Bill Growcock was a very strict, but a just parent, and loved to ‘spoil’ his children from time to time, but when his daughter asked for a camera for her birthday, he couldn’t really justify that expense for her gift, but told her that if she could earn most of the needed £1 which was the price of the camera, he would see what he could do. His daughter, who desperately wanted the camera took up the challenge, but how could she earn the money.

Arthur Yates, opened his seed business in Sydney in 1887, and ‘Yates’ Reliable Seed’ became the saviour of many New South Wales farmers, including those in northern New South Wales. Bill Growcock and his neighbours having to replant their maize after the floods, bought Yates seed at their local seed merchants.

In 1893 Arthur Yates had launched his seed packet service for the home gardener. Two years later he wrote the first Yates Garden Guide, which became a valuable asset to every home gardener. In the country all families had a garden of some sort to grow their own food, and often used the catalogue services of Yates for their packeted seed.

It was these seed packets that were to earn Bill Growcock’s daughter, the money for her coveted camera. She bought by mail order from Yates, bundles of packets of the most popular garden seeds, at a small discount. She then sold these packets of seeds at Yates catalogue prices to the family and friends of the Growcock family. They were happy to pay her the full price of the packeted seeds as it saved them time and money in sending their own orders to Yates. Depending on the size of the packets and type of seed, Bill’s daughter, was able to make a profit of a farthing up to a halfpenny per packet of seed. To earn the money for the camera, she needed to sell well over five hundred packets of seed. She carried on this task diligently over several months throughout the Summer of 1924 and then well into the Spring of 1925. Her father added the occasional halfpenny he received in change, until in late 1925 the target had been reached, and her father helped her to get her new Brownie Box Camera.

One of the first photographs she took was her father feeding ‘the chooks’, which unfortunately was a little out of focus. She also took a photograph of her brother, Bill, who was standing close by her father, and another of the ‘chooks’ themselves. Then I believe the horse and cows came in for planned stardom. Later these photographs were developed by Kodak and the two family snap shots, those of Bill Growcock, and his young son,Bill, were sent home to Bill’s sisters in Ireland.

Over the years, this camera was used to send further family snap shots back to Ireland, including photographs of some of Bill Growcock’s grandchildren in the early 1950’s.

What happened to this camera? It was lost in the 1954 Flood in Murwillumbah, when a sea-trunk, originally owned by Bill Growcock, and by which time held many of the family treasures, including the camera and many of its precious photographs, was destroyed by rising flood waters before the family could rescue them.

In 1974 I found and corresponded with “Bill’ Growcock’s only living relative in Ireland. She shared with me the photograph of ‘Bill feeding the chooks’, which had been sent home to Ireland in 1925. I copied and shared this photo with Bill’s surviving children, some of whom copied, cropped and enlarged a section of this photograph, which is the one floating around on the internet.

I believe the camera is perhaps the greatest of inventions, especially as far as family history goes anyway, in that it captures one second in life, that can be held ‘forever’, or at least many years, if care is taken. What I find even more fascinating is the story behind that ‘one second in time’.

Now a plea to all those friends and relatives at least when you see this photo, no matter where on the Internet, that you will pause and remember, not only the man behind that ‘one second in history’, but the wonderful efforts of his daughter, who earned that camera, which captured the many priceless family heirlooms.

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© Copyright 2012-2015 Nola Mackey at nolamackey.wordpress.com

Across the Sea to Ireland-The Growcock Family of County Meath..

On my paternal line I’m only second generation in Australia. My paternal grandfather, William Growcock emigrated from County Meath, Ireland in 1891 on the ‘Jumna’

While many Irish went to USA and Canada, my grandfather emigrated half way round the world to Queensland. Although he was the only member of his family to emigrate, he already had three cousins, William, John and Michael Growcock, in Queensland.

William Growcock, spent some years in Queensland before he settled at Zara on the North Arm of the Tweed River. He can be found there on the Householders Returns of the 1901 Census among a number of settlers. He was still residing there when he married at All Saints, Church of England, in Murwillumbah, on 23 March 1910. His bride was Olive Pearl Vidler, the daughter of Thomas Nathaniel and Margaret Jane Vidler (nee Goodwin).

William and Olive Growcock, had a dairy farm at Zara, and three daughters, Myra, Doris and Merle were born while they lived there. In 1916 the farm was sold to George Angel James Vidler, a younger brother of Thomas Nathaniel Vidler.

The Growcock family then moved to another dairy farm at Tygalgah, on the river flats just out of Murwillumbah. Olive, William, Myrtle, Ailsa and Robert were born when the family lived there. Sadly their daughter Merle died of diptheria in 1920, and was buried in the Church of England section of the Murwillumbah Cemetery.

My father, William (always known as ‘Bill’) was only eight years of age when his father died suddenly,of a heart attack, on the 18 April 1929. Bill was present at the time and could recall the event in graphic detail, until his own death more than seventy years later. Although the informant on William’s death certificate, A C Pratt, was not a member of the family, he was able to give details of William’s parents, James and Elizabeth Growcock (nee Anderson). The place of birth was stated as ‘ County Meath, Ireland’ and his age as 54 years. His marriage certificate confirmed his parents as James and Elizabeth Growcock (nee Anderson), but gave no clues to where he was born in Ireland.

William Growcock’s immigration records in the Queensland State Archives only gave ‘Meath, Ireland’ as his place of origin.

The fact that we had no idea where in County Meath to look for the birth certificate of William, the son of James and Elizabeth Growcock was a stumbling block for our research for some time. Then in 1973 my brother, Allan, was sent to Dublin for work. He searched the whitepages phone book and was able to identify one person, living in the County of Meath with the surname,and set out to meet with him. George Growcock, knew little of his family heritage, but he was able to give Allan his sister’s name and address and Allan then went to see her. Sarah Buchanan (nee Growcock) was delighted and most interested to hear about the Australian connections. She was able to tell Allan, the Growcock family had been settled in the parishes of Rathcore and Rathmoylan since before the 19^th Century and the original parish registers had survived and were still held in the local church. Although the parish minister was not residing the parish, Allan was finally able to contact him and make arrangements for the extraction of details on the persons with the Growcock surname. Sarah Buchanan’s daughter, Mary who had children about the same age as our children started corresponding with me and we are still in touch today.

Then as often happens in the ‘family history’ research a chain of serendipitious events was set in motion. Within three weeks of Allan’s visit, George Growcock, had another visitor, Mary Turner (nee Growcock) who was also seeking her Growcock ancestors. Sarah Buchanan was able to give Mary my address and we have continued to correspond. Sarah and Mary had addresses of Canadian Cousins, William Bosworth, Robert James, and Margaret Growcock ,which they passed on. I corresponded with William’s daughter until her death.

I was also able to trace and make contact with the families of John and Michael Growcock, the Queensland cousins of my grandfather, William Growcock.

After Allan’s visit to Ireland we were able to apply to the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in Dublin and get our grandfather, William Growcock’s birth certificate. We found he was born on 12 January 1867 and he was some years older than he let be known in Australia.He was actually 62 years at the time of his death in 1929, not 54 as stated.

Over the years I have able to get birth, marriage and death certificates of many other Growcock family connections in Ireland.

So having collected family documents and photos from all over the world I am now putting together the family story.