Queensland School Pupils

This index of school pupils will provide you with transcripts of key information:

• First name(s) – Recorded as written from the source document and usually includes a full given name or a first name followed by an initial. Occasionally, only initials are recorded. A question mark (?) indicates that a first name was either not given or cannot be deciphered.

• Last name – Spelling may differ, check all variants. A question mark (?) indicates that a last name was not given or cannot be deciphered.

• School name – The school where the pupil was enrolled.

• Year of admission – Depending on the source, this is usually given; however, where registers are missing, a year range is given instead.

• Date of admission – Sometimes this was not supplied in the source records.

• Source – The document indexed, which will often contain additional information that was not indexed.

• Reference – An identifier that allows you to locate the entry in the source document: the page number if the source document is a published book or an admission number or left blank (the year is often enough to locate the entry) if the source document is an admission register.

This database covers over 1.6 million names drawn from 1,022 Queensland schools. The earliest date of admission is 1864. Where we have extracted the pupil names directly from Admission Registers a 30-year closure has been observed as recommended by Education Queensland. Where the information has already been published, the names for all the years have been included. Schools range from large city schools with admissions in the thousands to one-teacher country schools with a total enrollment of only hundreds. Some schools have long ceased to exist; others are still functioning.

The index covers both provisional and state schools. In the early days, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) set up provisional schools at the request of parents who generally agreed to provide the building for school purposes and some of the essential requirements. The DPI, later the Education Department, supplied the teacher and the rest of the requisites. This was an interim measure taken by both parties to provide schooling for needy children until it could be established that a permanent school was really needed. A state school would then be built. Some provisional schools never made the transition to a state school as they closed due to lack of attendance. By 1909, most provisional schools still in existence became state schools under an Act of Parliament. This did not prevent provisional schools opening after this time.

Sources from which the names are drawn are diverse: actual school admission registers, school histories covering a significant anniversary (Jubilee, Golden, Centenary) in the life of a school, and local histories which don’t specifically focus on the school but include a pupil list as part of their story.

Many sources provide additional information on the pupils including age at admission, birth date, parent’s name and occupation, religion, and address – all very useful to a genealogist and family historian. Schools are a source we cannot afford to overlook.

Whatever the source, care has been taken to make this index as faithful to that source as possible. Some admission registers, poorly recorded in the first instance, or having deteriorated through time or neglect, provided a challenge for transcribers. Some lists taken from the published sources presented with obvious errors but as a matter of policy were deemed to be an accurate transcription and indexed as such.

• Start your search with just a first and last name.

• If searching by a full name is not yielding the expected result, try broadening your search by checking name variants on the search screen. Additionally, your ancestor’s first name may not have been recorded in full. Try searching with just an initial.

• If you need to narrow your results, try including a year or school name. Keep in mind that, occasionally, a specific year was not included.