About the Record
A record is only as trustworthy as its provenance. This page states ours plainly — who runs the Record, where every scan and every transcription comes from, and the bargain we strike with the people who add to it.
The Colonial Record is built and kept by Blue Horse Studios Pty Ltd, a small independent studio in Bendigo, Victoria — on the goldfields country these gazettes once wrote about. There is no media group behind it and no genealogy conglomerate above it.
The same hands that build the transcription pipeline answer the mail. If an unlock gives you the wrong record, one email inside seven days gets a refund or a re-credit — no forms, no questions. That promise is kept by a person, not a portal: office@colonialrecord.com.au.
Two streams feed the Record, and every entry says which one it came from.
The public archive. The gazettes are official publications of the colonial governments — printed by authority, week after week, from the 1830s on. Their copyright expired long ago; they belong to everyone. We work from digitised scans held in public collections, principally the State Library of Victoria's gazette archive, and we keep the original page image beside everything we derive from it. The Record opens with the 1836 New South Wales Government Gazette, processed issue by issue — new issues enter continually, and what searchers ask for decides what we process next.
Lodged documents. Contributors bring documents the public archive doesn't hold — station papers, certificates, letters, local records — and choose, explicitly, to share them. Lodged records are labelled as user-contributed and unverified until reviewed, and the source is always credited. The terms of that exchange are below.
Nineteenth-century type is hard on machines: broken sorts, tight columns, long-s ligatures, pound signs and fractions. No single reading of it can be trusted. So every page in the Record passes through the same chain of custody:
A high-resolution scan of the gazette itself. It is never altered, and it is always shown — every claim we make can be checked against it.
One engine reads the page's structure — columns, tables, the order a clerk meant it to be read in. A second reads its characters — the names, the figures, the £ s d. Each does only what it is good at.
The two readings are reconciled word by word. Where they agree, the text is kept. Where they disagree, the conflict is recorded — not silently guessed away.
Every notice carries a confidence rating — High, Medium, or Needs review — and unclear readings and possible-but-unproven matches are labelled as exactly that.
Every extracted fact links to its issue, date, page, and the exact region of the original scan. If you quote the Record, you can cite the gazette.
Machine reading is good and it is imperfect — which is why the original is always one click away, and why important findings should be verified against it. If you find an error, tell us: a corrected reading enters the Record like everything else, on the evidence. The fuller account is at How accuracy works; how to quote and reference what you find is at Cite & sources.
When you lodge a document, an exchange takes place. Here is the whole of it — the same terms you agree to at the counter, in the same words we use among ourselves:
The full policy — written to be read — is at Privacy Policy.
We use the word deliberately. “Colonial” names the period these documents come from — the decades of a young nation in the making, when the business of making it was set down, week by week, in the administration's own hand: the land grants, the licences, the proclamations, the rewards. We don't use the word as nostalgia, and we won't dress it up as something quainter than it was. The record is called colonial because that is what it is. We publish it whole, cited and searchable, so that everyone it names — and everyone it left out — can read it, question it, and draw their own conclusions.
The Record is open. Search it free, and pay only when a record is worth keeping.