Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Victorian Government Gazette online archive

Digitised records are among my very favourite online sites I like to visit in my family and local history research. I especially, love to see Australian content online so it was with great pleasure hot on the heels of The National Library’s Australian Newspapers Beta website that the State Library of Victoria has released the Victorian Government Gazette online archive 1836-1997.

http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au/
Particularly for place name research, this website will be a boon to local history researchers.

To quote the site:

What information is found in the Gazette?

The Victoria Government Gazette is the government's method of notifying the general public of its decisions and activities. It includes a wide range of information from land transactions, insolvency notices, impoundments and patent applications, to shipping and emigration notices, licences, contracts, proclamation of acts, government appointments, and more.

Gazette entries may be anything from a brief notification of a road closure or the address of a registered company to a detailed description of wages to be paid in various industries such as breadmaking, or a 200-page list of everyone who is registered to practice medicine in the Victoria.

About this site

This website includes images of every page of every relevant gazette and government notice produced since 1836. These include:

New South Wales Government Gazette (NSW) 1836 to 1851
Port Phillip Government Notices (PP) January to July 1843
Port Phillip Government Gazette (PP) January 1844 to July 1851
Victoria Government Gazette (VIC) July 1851 to 1997
Please note: No copies are known to exist for the period July-December 1843. Gazette information for this period may be in The Port Phillip Herald newspaper under the 'Melbourne Government Gazette' column.

What you can do on this site

You can:

view each page of each relevant gazette produced since 1836
browse the gazettes by decade, by year, by month and page-by-page
search for and read individual pages or entries by keyword, date or phrase
download and print PDFs of entire gazettes

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