Please note: Family History online certificates are currently taking 3 weeks to process.

The Registry holds over 17 million records of events registered in New South Wales. These records include:

• Early Church Records (baptismal, marriages and burials) from 1788 to 1855.

• Birth, death and marriage registrations from 1856 to the present day.

The Registry produces certificates from these records.

Because the Registry collects sensitive and private data about you and your family, and with the rise in Identity Fraud within Australia, the Registry has stringent entitlement and identification policies in place. For these reasons, certificates are categorised as 'restricted' or 'unrestricted'.

Restricted records are normally only available to the person named on the certificate and identification is always required.

Unrestricted records are available to anyone. Identification is not required. We refer to these unrestricted records as Family History Records (Certificates).

Family History Certificates are available to anyone if the event occurred:

Births 100 years ago or more
Deaths 30 years ago or more
Marriages 50 years ago or more

To assist customers in undertaking family history research, the Registry provides free access to unrestricted birth, death and marriage family history indexes. This published information on this website is referred to as Online Historical Indexes.

As the Historical Indexes contain limited information, you can purchase a full birth, death or marriage Family History Certificate online which provides more information than the Historical Index results.

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