Cooktown Archives and Research Centre
Monday to Friday - 9am to 12noon
Please contact the manager if these times do not suit, and we will try to arrange another time for you.

Volunteers are waiting to assist you with your requests, whether they are Local History or Family History (local)

Family History is the means of putting 'people' back into history

The more that we learn about people who lived in Cooktown, the more we learn about Cooktown. The Cooktown Historical Society is trying to build an Archive of history so that people now and in the future retain the history of our area

We invite you to donate to the Archives, any information about families, events or anything about Cooktown that you may know.

If however you would like to know more about your ancestors or people of Cooktown in general, then our Volunteers are waiting to assist with your research; payment is a donation to the Cooktown Historical Society.

We are also keen to build up our collection of photos on Cooktown and the region. If you have any photos of Cooktown, or its families, we would be interested in obtaining copies from you. You keep the original. We have a scanner so we are able to take a digital copy while you wait, if you don't wish to part with your photos. Alternatively, you could scan them at about 600 dpi if possible, and send the CD to us. We would be most appreciative.

The Cooktown Historical Society has been working towards having all information placed on a searchable database, to enable searches to happen very easily and very fast.

To date (January 2009) we have over 60,000 names on our databases, including a growing list of Chinese. These people were all early residents of Cooktown from 1873 on.

The following databases have been digitized and are currently in use by our society.

• Index to Cooktown
• Births (1874 - 1905)
• Deaths (1883 - 1945)
• Marriages (1883 - 1907)
• Cooktown Cemetery Register (1874 - 2000)
• Residents and Property Owners (1878 and 1940) - Shows property description as well as owners of properties. These include the recordsof the Daintree Divisional Board, the Hann Divisional Board, the Cooktown Municipal Council and the Cook Shire Council.
• Cooktown Businesses and Locations (1874 and 1886) - Taken from advertisements in newspapers and almanacs.
• Cooktown State School Admission Registers (Incomplete due to missing years)
  Boys School 1885 - 1921
  Girls School 1919 - 1921
  State School 1921 - 1941
• Cooktown Volunteers in WW1 - Shows extensive research with military and civilian details
• Electoral Rolls of 1877, 1899 and 1914
• Publicans of Cooktown and the surrounding areas up to 1900
• Post Office Directory (1889 - 1947)

Volunteers are working on projects which include the ongoing digitisation of the Council Archives; developing a searchable database for our extensive photo collection; digitisation of ships records; and continued indexing of our growing archive collection.

Photographic, Document and Map Collection - the documents have been indexed so that any reference to individuals can be easily located.

Maytown Cemetery - photos and plan of cemetery, plus details of burials

Coen Cemetery - photos and details of burials

Register of Lone Graves in the Cooktown area (still growing)

We also have access to the James Cook Museum Collection of Photographs and Documents

Our collection is continually growing, if you can't find it this year, try again next year.