What is: The Ryerson Index

The Ryerson Index to death notices and obituaries in Australian newspapers is pretty much what it says on the tin. It was started in 1998 by members of the Sydney Dead Persons Association so it is most complete for the Sydney and NSW papers, but they have volunteers working in other regions too.

This index will give you full name (as shown in the newspaper), age, date, type of notice, newspaper name and date, and other details which may include the location of death and/or where the person was from. It doesn't include the name of the person who inserted the notice or other family names so you'll need to go to the original notice for that.



The Ryerson Index is a terrific resource for finding:

• Deaths which occurred after the current cutoff for official indexes - in New South Wales the Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM) Family History search only covers death registrations that are more than 30 years old, this is a moving wall which is updated at the start of every year. Ryerson may includes notices soon after they appear in the daily newspapers. 
• People who aren't appearing in the Trove digitised newspapers search results but should be - perhaps because they have a common name, or because the computer generated text for that particular article isn't very accurate and hasn't been updated by volunteer text correctors yet.
  Ryerson will give you the newspaper and date of the funeral notice or obituary which allows you to browse to the correct day in Trove and hunt manually.
• Which of a list of people who found in the BDM index could or couldn't be your ancestor, based on where they were or their age. I used Ryerson to find one man who actually hadn't had a death notice published because the other plausible people listed in the NSW BDM obviously weren't him when I looked at their records in Ryerson. This allowed me to take a punt on ordering a death certificate, and it did turn out to be the correct one.   
• Lists of people who died in a particular place in particular years (handy for local historians)