Parish and historical maps offer a link to the past and provide information about local history, family genealogy and your property’s background. These maps may also be of use if you are conducting a current property transaction.
The NSW Land Registry Services’ (NSW LRS) collection of historical maps is a rich source of information about land ownership and boundaries going back to the beginning of European settlement in NSW.
Finding parish and charting maps
Historical Land Records Viewer
The Historical Land Records Viewer (HLRV) is an online tool that you can use to explore parish and historical maps. It includes digital records of the charting of the state’s cadastre (property boundaries), which were digitised from hard copy maps in 2002. An archive of these maps can be viewed for free in the Historical Land Records Viewer.
If you don’t know the name of the parish associated with a property, you can use the Geographical Names Register to search by locality or suburb. The parish name will be included in your search results.
Crown plans
Copies of a Crown plan image can be purchased from an approved Information Broker.These plans can also be viewed free of charge on public terminals at NSW State Archives and Records’ reading rooms, located in The Rocks and Kingswood, NSW.
About charting maps
Charting Maps act as an index to locate title-related records and may contain information such as original grantee name (and occasionally the grant date); references to volume and folio numbers (reference to title); and primary applications (used to convert Old System properties to Torrens title).
The charting map collection consists of all 7,515 regional parish maps, status branch parish maps and NSW Land Registry Services charting maps. Hard copy charting maps were used to record changes to land boundaries in NSW until manual updates ceased in 2002. Town maps for established town areas within the parishes are also included and were last updated in 1991.
Charting maps can also be used to locate Crown plans, the original survey diagrams that provide survey details and land dimensions and size. A current Crown plan provides the latest legal boundaries of the land.
Resources
If you are interested in exploring more of NSW's land heritage, NSW LRS produced a series of guides to searching NSW LRS records. These guides may be helpful to researchers, although some information has been superseded.