If I can expand on teh good responses to date: Australia is a federation and births, deaths and marriage registration is a State (or Territory) matter. Marriage and divorce have been regulated by the Commonwealth in the 1960s but registration remains within the control of each of the six states (there are 10 territories who have separate administration but not all of them have permanent populations). To prevent identity theft, each State and Territory limits access to its index of BDMs. As has been pointed out, you need to search each jurisdiction. Where/when were they last heard from? If you are not sure, then - if the immigration occurred after federation in 1901, then check for a record in the National Archives http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/recordsearch/index.aspx Go to name search, input the surname for which you are looking then use the drop-down list to select immigration and naturalisation records then work your way through the search results. Hope it's not Smith, Jones or Brown! The information available varies from record to record - you may the name of the ship, the port/date of departure, port/date of arrival, all the names and ages of the family but you may get less than this. There is comprehensive list of Australian links at: http://www.coraweb.com.au/ For example, see http://www.coraweb.com.au/bdmindex.htm Here are some of the sources I have used: For death, funeral, probate and in memoriam notices and coroner's reports, a newspaper search can be more fruitful. Australian newspapers are dominated by two companies: News (the dirty digger himself) and those formerly controlled by the Fairfax family. http://www.news.com.au/ http://www.fairfax.com.au/ The National Library of Australia has a project whereby newspapers 1803-1954 which have been filmed are being put online - the coverage varies and is growing daily. Start at: http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home The Ryerson Index is useful especially for death/funeral/probate notices in Sydney NSW but with some wider and increasing coverage: http://www.ryersonindex.com/ There is also the Rootsweb list Aus Newspaper extracts which is good for recent Queensland deaths - its coverage of other states is somewhat limited http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search?aop&path=AUS-NEWSPAPER-EXTRACTS For NSW: http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/search.htm is the official portal for death certificates. There is a moving 30 year window for deaths so Deaths [1788 - 1978] are available. There are many quirks in the system. If you don't find what you are looking for at first, try using wildcards (Barlo* = Barlow, Barloe, Barlowe etc; Barlo?= Barlow, Barloe but not Barlowe). If you are looking for shipping records before federation, try: http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/indexes-online There's also a rootsweb list at: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/intl/AUS/AUS-NSW.html plus many others for particular areas. For Victoria: https://online.justice.vic.gov.au/bdm/index-search?action=getHistIdxSearchCriteria This is a pay-per-search site (the Victorians caught Thatcherism sooner and the illness lasted longer. Lots of stuff was privatised and "user pays" ate into lots of public services). Also useful for pre-federation records is: http://proarchives.imagineering.com.au/default.htm For Queensland: Deaths that occurred in Queensland between 1829 and 1929 https://www.bdm.qld.gov.au/IndexSearch/DeaIndexQry.m For Tasmania, good advice can be found at: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~austashs/resource/mal_index.htm I haven't searched for other States (WA and SA) or Territories (the most populous are the Australian Capital Territory & Northern Territory - with Norfolk Island, they are the only territories with self-government, all three have their own web portals). Then there's New Zealand .... Regards Ian J