Tasmanian court records

​Court records can be a valuable source of information for family historians. Early trial records can be scant but newspaper accounts often compensate.​ The following should prove useful for criminal and civil prosecutions.

What is online?

Lower Court records

The majority of lower court petty session records have been digitised up to 1900. Do an agency search for your district (e.g. Bothwell Lower Court) and then look for ‘petty sessions’ in the list of records. To find lower court districts, you can start by putting just "lower court" in the agency title field.

Supreme Court records 

Crown Law Criminal Cases

What else is there?

Criminal cases

Crown Law records

Apart from being of interest in their own right, these are useful because the Supreme Court criminal files (SC81) before 1951 have not survived.

Crown Law prosecutes cases in the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court records

Civil cases

Notes

Only files older than 75 years from today are available without permission from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

  • Trove for accounts of court appearances. For the Colonial period these accounts are often more informative than the surviving Court records.
  • Guide to prison records

What can I find from other organisations?