Finding living people in Australia can be a bit tricky. Thanks to the help of Clare, a Your DNA Guide customer from Australia, we’ve compiled some resources for finding living people in Australia.
Finding Living People in Australia
White Pages: White Pages allows you to search for residential and business and government listings to search for people. You can search for residential landlines and addresses by surname, initial, and suburb, state, or postal code. Few people have landlines anymore, and mobile numbers are not published online, so White Pages may not yield any results, but it’s still worth trying.
Oz Reunion: Oz Reunion is a website that launched in 2000 and is meant to find long-lost family and friends in Australia. There are different types of listings, including school reunions, adoption registers, finding a lost contact, and more. For some types of listings there is a fee for you to submit a listing. The listing includes details of the person you are trying to contact. Oz Reunion does not conduct searches, people using the site would have to find your posting.
Electoral rolls: Current Australian Electoral Rolls are only available to view in person by going to an Australian Electoral Commission office. The National Library of Australia holds electoral rolls up to 2008 on microfiche and up to 2009 in hardcopy format. Ancestry also has historical electoral rolls (1903-1980). Electoral roll records contain name, address, occupation (this was omitted after 1983), and gender.
Death and funeral notices: Death and funeral notices are not typically as detailed as American obituaries, but they can still provide names of living relatives of the deceased person. Only the biggest newspapers tend to have recent death notices online. For example, the Canberra Times has death and funeral notices available as far back as 2011.
- Deaths & Funerals is a consolidated index from across Australia that lists over 550,000 funeral and death notices as far back as 2008.
- The Ryerson Index is another useful source for current death and funeral notices. Some probate notices and obituaries are also available on this site. The index initially started in New South Wales, so it has a strong representation of notices from that state. The site is indexed by volunteers and is updated weekly.
- Trove is the National Library of Australia’s free collection of online digitized historical newspapers, where you might find death notices.
Social media: Social media is always a good place to search for living people. You may find profiles for people on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. Seeing that younger people tend to have more of a social media presence, you may have better luck finding younger matches via social media.
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