Cite & sources
The Record is a finding aid and a corrected transcription — the source is the gazette itself. This page shows what stands behind every citation, how to quote what you find, and where the records come from.
Every notice in the Record carries a citation to the original publication, in this form:
The gazette (or, for lodged documents, the credited source) the record was printed in — named in full, never “our database”.
The numbered issue and its masthead date, so the record can be found in any other copy of the same gazette — ours or an archive's.
The page the notice appears on. The free preview cites the source; the page number and exact location come with the unlocked record — finding the right spot in a thirty-page issue is part of what the unlock buys.
Behind the printed citation, the Record stores the precise region of the scanned page each fact came from — the “This notice” marker you see beside every unlocked record.
Cite the gazette, not us. The gazette is the primary source, and our citation is written so it stands on its own: anyone can take it to any copy of the gazette and find the notice without the Record's help. Use the citation exactly as it appears beneath the notice, in whatever referencing style your work requires.
If your discipline asks you to note where a transcription was obtained — good practice, since machine-read text can err — add a second line:
Quotations matter more than most claims, so quote from the unlocked corrected text, check it against the original scan shown beside it, and cite the page. How that text is produced — and how its confidence ratings work — is set out at How accuracy works.
Two streams feed the Record, and every entry says which one it came from — they carry different weight, and we label them accordingly.
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. The Record opens with the 1836 New South Wales Government Gazette, processed issue by issue — new issues enter continually.
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, the source is always credited, and citations name the lodged document — never dress it up as an official publication.
The original scan is never altered, and it is always shown beside what we derive from it. The full account of both streams is on About the Record.
Answers from Ask the Record carry a citation on every claim, each resolved to the specific notice it came from, and every answer is checked against the records it gathered before it reaches you. Treat an answer as a guide to the sources, not as a source itself: verify anything you intend to rely on against the cited notice and its original page.
Search is free, and so is the source citation on every result — see what exists before you pay anything.