To document Aboriginal ancestry, you need to have a sequence of records going back from you to an identified or accepted Aboriginal person.
Families of Tasmanian Aboriginal people were identified as living on the Bass Strait islands in the early 1900s.
If your family tree doesn’t link up to these people, you may need to trace it back 70 or 80 years. You need to find records identifying the person named as an Aboriginal person.
You may need to look at the records of a lot of people. It is good if you know the line of Aboriginal ancestry. If you do not know the Aboriginal family, you may need to trace back all your ancestors. This is time-consuming and sometimes complicated.
Remember: the process you use to prove Aboriginal descent is the same as anyone researching family history.
To start
- Identify the branch of your family that you believe to be Aboriginal
- Gather as much information about the family as you can working backwards from yourself
- Keep copies of the material proving a line across the generations to an Aboriginal person
Try:
- Talking to family members.
- Checking family records such as Bibles, letters, diaries and photos.
- Searching published indexes to cemeteries.
- Birth, death and marriage certificates are helpful.
Once you have traced your family members to before 1900, you can:
- Search the Tasmanian Names Index to view many records, including wills, inquests and birth, death and marriage records.
- Work your way back step by step until you find a reference to the first registered event for your family in these records. This is usually a marriage or a birth where you can find no previous records of the parents.
If none of the people you have traced are identified in a record as Aboriginal, you need to check they did not come to Tasmania as a free immigrant or as a convict. Check convict and arrival records to see if this is why the family appears in later records.
This information is sourced from Libraries Tasmania. Visit their website for more information and assistance in tracing your family tree. www.libraries.tas.gov.au