Discover if your ancestor was a man of note with an Australian connection and learn more about notable dates in Australian history. Find their place of birth and a biography as well as a history of Australia from the 16th century in this fascinating 19th century book.
Discover if your ancestor was a man of note with an Australian connection and learn more about notable dates in Australian history. Find their place of birth and a biography as well as a history of Australia from the 16th century in this fascinating 19th century book.
Biographies in the first section of the book can vary in length from a paragraph to a few pages. The amount of information obviously varies but you can find out the following about your ancestor:
Full name
Date and place of birth
A biography including occupational history and their contribution to Australasian history
The second part of the book is the Directory of Dates which includes a list of topics (like Aborigines, Charitable Institutions, Schools of Art etc). For each topic there is a list of connected events, in chronological order.
The Australian Dictionary of Dates and Men of the Time, History of Australasia from 1542 to May 1879 was published by J.H. Heaton in 1879.
As this book is provided in PDF format, finding a specific word or phrase will be rather different from searching one of our other databases. You can browse the entire document as you would a physical book or download it to look at at your leisure but we have provided a couple of tips to help you get started.
Searches need to be for exact words or phrases as they appear in the text. Your search results will be the pages on which that search term appears.
If you want to find someone by name then you need to write the name as it would appear in the book. So if you were looking for your uncle Bob whose surname was Smith you’d be looking for a Robert Smith in most instances.
You can use certain punctuation in text searches. If you want to look for an exact phrase then use inverted commas to group the words together “like this”. You can also separate separate search terms by commas, for example “Robert Smith”, doctor.
Don’t forget that you can also search for any other pieces of information you may have. A job title or place where your ancestor lived can narrow things down considerably.
You can make the text on the document bigger by moving your mouse to the bottom right corner of the image and clicking on the magnifying glass symbol with a plus sign in it that appears there. You can also print, save and return the image to its previous size from this menu.