Mostly we used resources that are free and publicly available.
Newspapers accessed through Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au) constituted our most useful source. After 1880 Trove gave us access to the Mount Barker Courier (the Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser), which was indispensable.
Occasionally we found authored books relevant to our areas of research, for example Eric Spehr’s A Biography of John Banks Shepherdson (for Marianne Shepherdson) and N.R. McKenzie’s The Gael Fares Forth (for Roderick McKenzie).
Commercial ancestry sites, used with caution, filled some gaps and gave access to records such as immigration data and Births, Deaths and Marriages.
Amongst the families we researched, recorded causes of death included childbirth, hit by train, diabetes, consumption, meningitis, diphtheria, appendicitis, pneumonia, rheumatic fever, old age, fall from horse, inflammation of the lungs, drowning, measles, bronchitis, senile decay, sunstroke, suicide, “Spanish flu,” carditis, heart disease, ruptured blood vessel, accidentally shot, and influenza.
