Find your ancestors in New South Wales Government Gazettes 1832-1863

What can these records tell me?

This is an index to personal names appearing in the NSW GG 1832-1863.

  • Name
  • Date
  • Place
  • State
  • Country

Discover more about New South Wales Government Gazettes 1832-1863

Government gazettes are a unique and useful resource for family, local and social history researchers alike. They were published by the government as a means of communication to officials and the general public. As such, their information covers a broad spectrum of the community, recording facts concerning tens of thousands of ordinary people every year.

The New South Wales Government Gazette was first published on 7 March 1832. Before this, official notices were printed in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, which was the first newspaper in the colony.

The gazette was usually published weekly, although there were sometimes special issues. In addition, indexes to the gazettes were published on a roughly quarterly basis.

Often the information was of an administrative and bureaucratic nature, but the gazettes can reveal fascinating insights into your ancestor’s life and times. The level of detail they contained varied widely over the years.

This dataset contains 830,000 personal names indexed from the NSW Government Gazettes 1832-1863 by volunteers at the Society of Australian Genealogists and was originally published on CD in 2005 by the SAG. For the purposes of this indexing work each record was classified into broad event categories, eg a ‘Convict indulgence’ may refer to the person named receiving a Ticket of Leave, a Certificate of Freedom or a Conditional Pardon. Consulting the original entry in the NSW Government Gazette will provide more precise information.

© Society of Australian Genealogists.