Excellent advice (as always) from Cando.
Do you have access to Ancestry to look at the tree or do you need help from us. If you have access make sure the tree is well referenced ie the sources are cited....and even then you still need to check them yourself and I understand ancestry give 'hints' that aren't always correct but people post the 'hints' to their tree.
From my resource
REDFERN Thomas Henry born Manchester
PAINTER Clara born London
1867 Reg#122
Cando
I always have trouble being brief, and so I apologise for this long contribution....
There are two main parts to Ancestry. There's the section that has uploaded images and/or indexes that point to official records and then there's the section where individual members SUBMIT their interpretations of their family tree.
If you don't have direct access, many NSW public libraries do offer terminals with access. Of course only a very small part of NSW official records are actually available online to view, and Ancestry is not the sole provider offering those images.
Here at RChat there are various Resources Boards, and as you are currently working back from yourself to your parents and then to their parents and further back, you can always rely on those Resources Boards to contain live links to help you do your own hunting out of official records.
Here's the link to RChat's Australian Resources Board
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?board=165.0 and once you have got there, there's boards for each of the States and Territories.
Many of us 'regulars' have our own offline resources, and we are simply sharing the info from these with you and with other RChatters, just as we have been helped with our own enquiries about our own family trees.
You have one of the best addictions known. I hope it will last your lifetime, and that it will help you bring great joy to your living family members. Along the way you will find some skeltons perhaps, and it is up to you IF and HOW you choose to introduce that information to your family. Just remember that each generation coped with the then conditions and social norms of those times, and what may have been a taboo subject for a Great Grandparent may be a well discussed topic today, and that today's taboo topics may well have been well discussed back in Grandparent's times.
Have you armed yourself with some blank treecharts, and an old fashioned pencil and eraser yet? These are still very very helpful at least to me when I am trying to figure out any RChatters complicated request for clues about their own forebears.
Fingers crossed you will be considering ordering some NSW BDM certs and if so, you will NOT go overboard with the pennies, but patiently work through from the recent generations firstly. If you are ordering NSW BDM certs, then may I suggest you consider ordering OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS to start. These contain all the info on the 'real deal' certs and are cheaper, and can arrive as email attachments (usually pdf if you order that way).
Here's the link to the NSW BDM family history indexes:
http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/searchHistoricalRecords.htm Here's the link to the NSW BDM's official transcription agents :
http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/howToTraceYouFamTree.htm Cheers, JM