Not a State Ward

Finding Your File If You Are Not A State Ward

If you were in an Orphanage or Children’s Home in Australia, or were Fostered, but you were NOT a State Ward, there will be no file held on you in the Government Department which dealt with children in ‘care’. Any file on you would have been kept by the Home that you were in, and many Past Providers (the organisations that ran the Homes) still have records of their Homes.

However, some Homes no longer exist, and the Organisation that ran them may have stored their records – or they may not have – and some records have been lost. Records of children in care were not a high priority with many, though not all agencies. So bear in mind that although it is always worth trying to obtain a record of your time in the Home, it may not always be possible.

Also remember that where records do exist, they often have very little information on them about individual children apart from dates of admission and discharge. They rarely contain any personal information.

You need to contact the past provider agency to see if they have a record of your time there. Contact CLAN for assistance with this if you need it.

There are now several publications which will give you the contact details for the organisation which ran your Home, or for the Home itself. All of these are available in the CLAN library but for reference only, not to be borrowed. We can look up your institution and copy relevant pages about it if you are unable to access the guide in any other way. It is worth asking your local library if they have a copy of the publication you want to look up. If they don’t, they may be able to get one for you on inter-library loan.