Help : General Information

General Information about the BDA Indexes and producing Biographical Reports

Biographical Index Search Results

An initial free name search throws up a list of index entries with brief summary details of the individual. See Help me Search for more information on searching tools.

Biographical Report

Biographical Reports are only available to subscribers. Click here to subscribe.

Each Biographical Report has a header section and a list of records from the Database called biographical items. See Sample pages

The header section contains primary vital information: birth, arrival, death, if Alive (where other dates are not known). It may also contain a general editorial comment for the person.

The Biographical Report lists all biographic items linked to the selected PersonID, sorted chronologically on year of the event. Biographical items from published worksare sorted on year of publication, and are listed after the biographic items which have specific event years.

Biographical items from published works with more than 500 characters are displayed as a truncated version with fewer than 500 characters, and with “Full Biographic Item of ……” on the last line. Click on “Full Biographic Item of ……” to open the complete Biographic Item. Click “Return to Biography” to return to the truncated version.

If the biographical item contains reference to more than one person, then you can click on ‘List all Persons’ to see a full list of all persons mentioned in the biographical item. From this list you can click on any person to view that person’s Biographical Report.

If the biographical item has a group symbol on the line, then you can click on the group symbol to see a full list of all the persons who were listed as part of that Group in the original document. A group may refer to a family group that travelled together on a ship or to a household group that was counted together as part of a census etc. From this list of all the persons who were listed as part of that group you can click on any person to view that person’s Biographical Report.

Each biographical item has a source reference. The reference is an abbreviated version, and clicking on that will lead you to the full reference and then to the source documentation

The ‘Print’ icon opens a print preview version of the Biographical Report, for printing.

Whilst viewing the Biographical Report on the screen, most browsers allow you to use Ctrl F to search for any word in the report

Linked records in BDA

Three types of links in BDA allow a user to navigate through the maze of interconnected data:

• Biographical items recording an event for a single person.

• Persons mentioned in a single Biographical item.

• Persons identified as a group in separate Biographical item records in a single source.

The Biographical Report uses the first type of link.

The User options ‘List all Persons’ and ‘Group Symbol’ available on the Biographical Report use the last two types of links.

Use the links on the menus on the right hand side of the page for more information on how to use the Biographical Database of Australia.