I have available an index of residents living in New South Wales in 1884/85.
This index provides the names of nearly 40,000 residents and is based on the 1885 census of the occupiers of land and owners of stock in New South Wales originally published in the Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales.
So if your ancestors were here in 1885 and whether they lived in the town or the country, owned land or not, it is most likely that they had a horse or a milking cow and maybe a few pigs and if so, they would be included in this 'census'.
The background to the census is that in 1884 the government of the day determined that a survey be taken all of all person ‘de-pasturising stock in the colony of New South Wales’.
The resulting survey is the closest thing available to a census as it gives details of the number of horses, cows, sheep or pigs owned by persons as well as providing the name of their holding / run in the case of those owning or leasing land, the acreage and the locality or town, the police district and the postal town.
Unfortunately for researchers the results were recorded alphabetically for each of the then 55 police districts by the name of the holding or locality and not that of the owner / occupier .
To overcome this difficulty I have combined all the 39,857 entries into one data base which is available to researchers in PDF format.
