Counties in the colony of New South Wales in 1850 (including the later states of Victoria and Queensland)

This dataset consists of the counties of the British colony of New South Wales (including portions that were later separated as Victoria and Queensland) as at the end of 1850. Counties were administrative regions largely used for purposes of land grants and sales, but also used for some colonial statistics, including five-yearly census returns. Counties could be either formally gazetted or informally defined for administrative purposes. Up to 1826 only seven counties had entered common use, of these only five had been formally gazetted. In 1829 the number of counties was increased to a total of nineteen - the so-called 'limits of location', beyond which land sales were (for a period) restricted. A small number of counties came into official use in the period following while remaining ungazetted. A further 31 counties were gazetted in 1848, while another 32 counties were authorised by the Surveyor General (but not gazetted) in 1850. No further changes to the number of counties were made until 1861. While counties in New South Wales remain in use, they have fallen out of usage in both Victoria and Queensland. There have also been some changes to boundaries within New South Wales since 1850. This dataset was created as part of the PhD research project, ‘Settlers and the city: the colonising entanglements of Sydney, its settlers, and their world, 1830-50’, undertaken by Nicholas Pitt and accepted April 2024. The data was created by combining multiple data sources (historical and contemporary) as described in the methodology. The fields consist of: Year: Earliest known year of the county name in use County: County name DateSource: Source of the earliest known year BoundarySource: Main source for verifying boundaries - note that multiple sources were used, as described in the methodology.