Samuel Taylor and the 1841 Census
A Settler's Home, New South Wales, ca. 1841 / watercolour by Frederick Garling. The image is from the collections of the State Library of NSW. According to Nick Vine Hall's Tracing Your Family History in Australia: a Guide to Sources : " The first full census of new South Wales was not made until 1828. Subsequent censuses were taken sporadically in the various colonies until 3 April 1881, when a census was taken for the first time on the same date throughout Australia." I decided to look at the 1841 Census for my 3 x great-grandfather, Samuel Taylor. The 1841 Census was taken on 2 March and is indexed and held on microfilm by the State Records of NSW (referred to as AONSW in Vine Hall's book) and the National Library of Australia (NLA). You can search the index on State Records site here or you can look at the digitized version on Ancestry . I am lucky that Samuel lived on the Murrumbidgee as not all places have names of individuals lis...