How To Search Trove

Main contributor: Dani Haski

Trove is an Australian website that aggregates extensive collections from libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives from all over Australia - including newspapers, images, books and ephemera. It is free to use and accessible online any time. Creating a free Trove account allows you to edit inaccurate transcriptions, create lists, and tag articles of interest.

Searching Trove is easy, but the sheer volume of material can lead to an overwhelming number of results so it's good to know how to filter your results and uncover the nuggets relevant to your own family's story. There are two ways to search - Simple Search and Advanced Search.

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Searching Trove

Simple Search

Trove has a simple search bar at the top of the home page that allows you to search all categories simultaneously. Simply type a word or phrase into the search bar and press enter or the green magnifying glass icon. If you're looking for a specifc person type their name in inverted commas.

Advanced Search

Advanced search is done by Category as each category can offer slightly different parameters.

Screenshots of Advanced Search panels for each Trove Category

Search Results

Simple Search returns the first three results in each Category. Alongside each category heading is the total number of results in said Category. Underneath the third result is a link to view all results in that category.

Filter your results

When you click on the View All Results button, the next page shows the first page of results automatically sorted by relavence. There are various ways to filter your results. From a drop down box you can change the sort by parameter to sort by Year - earliest first or latest first.

Using a series of checkboxes down the right hand side, you can refine your results by:

Type - this changes within each category
Place - the state the newspaper is published in
Title - the name of the specific publication, usually sorted by frequency of results
Category - these are actually subcategories within the main category
Date Range - first by decade, then year, then month
Illustration Type - if the article contains pictures, and
Word count - indicating if it is a long or short piece.

Filtering options change for each category and align with the options available in Advanced Search.

If you're searching for an unusual name you might find results quite quickly. For example: my 3x great-grandfather was Solomon SCHLOSSMAN. By searching his surname Trove returns results from both the 19th and 20th century. I know enough details about Solomon Schlossman's life in Australia to be able to sift and sort which articles are relevant to him, so in this case I know the first and third articles in the list above are about him. The first mentions the gold nugget he discovered in 1870 in Victoria; the third article is a vivid description of his funeral in Coolgardie, Western Australia, in 1895. All the other articles in this list pertain to other people with the surname SCHLOSSMAN.

If you're searching for someone with a common name - for example: John Smith - it may be much more difficult to sift out the irrelevant results. The more you know about your ancestor from other sources, the better chance you'll have to find relevant entries.

Some of the most useful results filter for genealogists in Newspapers is Family Notices. Family Notices include birth, marriage and death announcements, as well as In Memorium or condolence messages. These notices may appear in multiple newspapers around the country, especially if the individual had family interstate. In Memorium and Condolence messages may be placed by family members annually, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of an individual.

Condolence messages may indicate the names and residences of relatives and friends. Sometimes they may also indicate if a close family member is living overseas.

Trove Articles

When you select a search result the article may be highlighted as a stand alone feature or the entry may be part of a listing. You may have to scroll through the transcription column on the left hand side to find the highlighted search term, or, if the listings go over more than one page, search the second page to find your quarry.

Examples of different ways articles may be displayed in Trove (screenshots)
A single article view
Some results may appear in listings such as Family Notices.
Whole page view. If you mouseover the sections in the left hand menu the relevant section on the page is highlighted.

Organisation and Output Options

The left hand side menu in a Trove article presents you a series of options and tools to help you view, save and export articles you find in Trove that you would like to keep. You do need to logged in to take advantage of these.

Article Text contains a machine OCR transcription of the selected article. This may contain transcription errors that you can correct if you are a Voluntrove.
Cite contains a direct link to the article (the article identifier), a link to the page the article is on (the page identifier), and various standardised citation options you can copy and paste for reference. There are also options to download the citations data into various formats.
Tags allows you to add subject tags to individual articles
Lists allow you to create private, public and shared lists to collect articles under a single subject area
Notes allows you to annotate an article. The note is public by default but there is a checkbox to make the note private,
Categories allows you to include the result in extra subcategories.
Downloads allows you to download Individual articles as PDF, JPEG or Text files. Sometimes the layout may vary from the layout on the page. If this is a problem you can download the whole page as a PDF file. You also have the option to download the whole issue or publication that contains the article you want.
Buy allows you to purchase higher quality, larger sized photocopies or electronic copies of newspapers pages. Clicking on the Buy Now link will take you to the CopiesDirect webpage. Note: by this method you can only order one image each time. Charges apply.
Print, like download, gives you the option to directly print the image or plain text of your selected article.
Toggle Layout moves the OCR text window from the default position to the left of the image window to a position below the image window.

Tricks for new players

Machine OCR - The text in Trove articles is initially transcribed by an algorithm. Over time, Voluntroves may correct individual articles or sections but search terms may appear erroneously because of errors in the machine transcription.
Common Names - check, rechek and double check the information about people with common names. Do not assume the person mentioned in an article is the person you're looking for unless you can triangulate information such as location, time period or other known parameters.
Inverted Commas - Using inverted commas in a simple search can help to search a name or phrase. While the search will return some results with one or the other word, the combination of words will be weighted for relevance and appear closer to the top of the search results.

Explore more about how to search Trove

Trove: An Australian and Beyond Genealogical Treasure - webinar at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
Introducing OldNews.com, A New Website for Exploring Historical Newspapers - on the MyHeritage blog

References