Newspaper Archive

The British Library, in partnership with BrightSolid, are scanning in and computer-fying 40 million newspaper pages aver the next ten years.  At present, there are just under 4 million pages online, but they are adding 8,000 new pages everyday.

British Newspaper Archive

As you would expect a resource like this costs money to subscribe to: an eyewatering £79 a year.  Or £6.95 for a 48 hour pass.

However, searching is free and gives you brief excerpt of the articles found.  With this in mind, it is well worth doing a few searches and finding if there are any interesting articles relating to you family before you pay for anything.

I did this and made a list of what took my fancy, and once I had built up a substantial research schedule I took the plunge and paid for 48 hours.

The site is fantastic, a vast treasure trove of stories you would never discover any other way.  The images are crisp, and you can save them to your computer for later use.

Considering they are less than 10% of the way into the project, I found a remarkable amount.  Examples of what I discovered include a description of a fire that damaged my ancestor William Canning's shop, along with the discovery that the shop was called The South Western Laboratory, an article about my gt-gt grandmother's brother who drowned, several articles relating to crimes - family either being stolen from or doing the stealing.

Generally news means 'bad news' (crimes, tragedies, etc) although there are some good points.  One ancestor took part in a London boat race and there are mentions of marriages, reviews of theatrical performances and the like.  One thing that does stand out is the high quality of local newspaper journalism compared to today.

Local newspapers are a shadow of what they once were.  Bad spelling and inaccurate, lazy reporting are now commonplace.  But I digress.

The one downside is the search, as it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition).   This means the a computer 'reads' the page and decides what it says, rather than humans transcribing each page. 

A benefit of this is that as soon as a page is scanned it is searchable.  A negative is that OCR can be a little inaccurate. 

If you know something news-worthy happened and the appropriate newspaper is available but you are getting no results it may be worth searching just that date but different words relating to the event.

For example, you know that John Anon was murdered in Alphatown, and the Alphatown Gazette is available for that time but your search for John Anon brings up nothing.  Try using the advanced search to narrow things down.  Search in a specific month of a year, in just that paper for murder.  Chances are you'll find something.  It is worth thinking outside the box.

Also, I found a successful way of search was using the AND tool.  AND allows you to find articles which contain two, or more, separate words.

Example:  Searching for Jones Chelmsford will give results that contain the words Jones or Chelmsford, as well as those that contain both.

However, if you search for Jones AND Chelmsford you should get articles that contain the two words together.

Also using quotes allows more specific searches.  "Arthur Jones" will give results pertaining to Arthur Jones.

This is a growing resource and invaluable to genealogists.  Anyone using the site that needs help or advice can aways ask here.