This group is undertaking the indexing of personal columns in South Australian newspapers.

Such work is of significance in Australia because of embargoes of the purchase of modern Birth, Marriage and Death certificates. The people are relatively affluent and the majority post such notices to newspapers although with the decline in the print media for television and Internet, this has fallen off somewhat in recent years.

The only statewide newspaper, The Advertiser, is the primary source for this material although some regional newspapers are being included when appropriately placed volunteer help can be found.

The main thrust in the work with The Advertiser relates to Birth and Death Notices from 1977 to the present. The indexing will allow researchers to locate the particular edition of the newspaper containing the notice. We would like to include more detail to avoid the need to locate the newspaper, but at this time the paper's management has refused us permission.

The work with Births is completed and is just a matter of keeping the index up to date. This database contains 290,163 records from September 1977 to end of November 2003. Of course that leaves a significant gap in the records as South Australian Birth Registrations are embargoed for 70 years.

The work with the Death notices is not as advanced although there are few gaps in the period 1995 to the present with 1,019,547 records entered into the database. The team is concentrating on the task of working back from 1995 towards 1977. With an embargo of only 30 years for Death Registrations, this exercise will go a long way towards providing researchers with modern records. The Society urgently needs volunteers to assist in this project.

The work undertaken on regional newspapers is far less complete.