National Newspapers/Regional Newspapers/Papers of Special Interest
By Ruth A. Symes (Tweeting @RuthaSymes)
Many historic British newspapers have been digitised
and can now be accessed online from the comfort of your own home either free or
at a low cost. Other newspapers have been digitised by commercial
companies and have been sold as packages to libraries, and institutes of higher
and further education. If you are interested in looking at any newspapers in
the latter category, the first step would be to identify the nearest such
institutions to your home and then enquire which resources they have. Ask if you
need to be a member of that institution to view the digitised material, or if
you can buy a special day or weekly pass which will give you temporary access.
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| Man seated reading a newspaper. Engraving by C. W. Sharpe after T. S. Goode, undated. Wellcome Images [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
General British Newspapers and Periodicals
1. The
British Newspaper Archive and FindMyPast
Free to search. Pay to view. Also free to view at the
British Library’s Reading Rooms in St Pancras and Boston Spa, and at other
subscribing libraries and Institutes of Further and Higher education.
This digital archive, funded jointly by the British
Library and D. C. Thomson Family History includes the full text of more than 600
newspaper titles from every part of the UK and Ireland (including local,
national and regional titles), some going back to the eighteenth century. There
are currently more than 15 million pages of text available with more content
being added regularly.
Entering through the British Newspapers Archive
website, you can buy a monthly or yearly subscription or PayAsYouGo. Subscribers
to the FindMyPast website can get access
to the newspapers as part of their subscription package.
2. UK Press
Archive
Search for free. Pay to view.
Available in subscribing UK Institutions of Higher and
Further Education
This resource includes: The Daily Mirror (1803-1980); Daily
Express (1903- current); Church Times
(1863-current); The Watchman
(1835-1884); The Daily Worker
(1930-1945); and The South Eastern
Gazette (1852-1912) as well as some more recent titles.
3. Ancestry
Newspaper Archive Online
Free to search. Pay to view.
The newspaper collection includes: The
Times (1788-1833); England Southern
Railway Magazine (1840-1942); The
Gentleman’s Magazine Library (1731-1868); The Liverpool Courier (1897-1898); The Edinburgh Advertiser (sporadically 1771-1909); The Bristol Times and Mirror (1897); The Liverpool Daily Post (1897) and many
other titles.
4. The
Genealogist
Free to search. Pay to view.
The searchable newspaper resources include: The Channel Islands Monthly Review
(1941-1945); Harper’s Magazine
(1889); Illustrated London News
(1842-1918); Illustrated War News
(1914-1916); Jewish Chronicle
(1905-1908); Ss Great Britain Times
(1865); The B. e. f. Wipers Times and
other Publications (1865); The Great
War (1914-1919); The Sphere
(1914-1915); War Illustrated
(1914-1919)
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| Woman Reading Newspaper by Istvan Nagy 1918, Wikimedia Commons |
5. Internet
Library of Early Journals
Free to search and view
This project (which finished in 1999) aimed to
digitise at least twenty years’ worth of each of the following six eighteenth
and nineteenth-century journals. The
Annual Register; Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine; The Builder; The Gentleman’s Magazine; Notes and Queries; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Each magazine can
be searched individually by subject. No new material will be added to this
site.
6. Gale News
Vault Project
Free to search
and view in subscribing UK libraries and Institutions of Further and Higher
Education.
Digitised
collections include: Daily Mail
Historical Archive (1896-2004); Economist
Historical Archive (1843-2008); Financial
Times Historical Archive (1888–2006); Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003; Independent Digital Archive, 1986-2012; Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991; Picture Post Historical Archive,
1938-1957; Punch Historical Archive,
1841-1992; Sunday Times Digital Archive
1821-2006; Times Digital Archive
(1785-1985).
7. The Waterloo Directory of English
Newspapers and Periodicals (1800-1900)
Free to
search.
This is a
digitised index to 73,000 publications issued between 1800 and 1900. It is
indexed by topic, names, towns and publishers’ names. Find references to the topics you are
interested in and then take your results to a library which holds back copies
of the relevant publication.
has been indexed from 1829, the Belfast and Edinburgh
Gazettes have been indexed only from 2002. Indexes are free to search online.
8. The
Burney Collection (17th and 18th century)
Free to search and view at
subscribing Libraries and Institutes of Further and Higher Institutions. (A
joint project by The British Library and Gale Cengage Learning)
This includes over 1,270
newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials
published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from the British
colonies in Asia and the Americas. The papers were originally collected by the
Reverend Charles Burney (1757- 1817) and consisted of around 700 bound volumes.
They have now been greatly augmented. The data is fully searchable.
9.
Nineteenth-Century British Library
Newspapers
Free to search and view at subscribing Libraries and
Institutes of Further and Higher Education. (Managed by Gale Cengage)
The full text of 70 British
newspapers from 1800 to 1900. This includes some London national dailies
and weeklies, English regional dailies and weeklies; Scottish national,
Scottish regional, Welsh, Irish and Northern Irish newspapers. Priority for
inclusion has been to newspapers that were involved in promulgating political
or social movements (e.g. Reform Chartism and Home Rule). Six selected papers
are available to view freely online at www.
ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/ These are The
Monthly Repository (1806-1837) and Unitarian
Chronicle (1832-1833); Northern Star
(1838-1852); Leader (1850-1860); English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864); Tomahawk (1867-1870), Publisher’s Circular (1880-1890).
10. The Guardian (1821-2003) and Observer (1791-1923) Digital Archive
www.pqasb.pqarchiver.com
Pay to search and view.
Over 1.2 million pages of the Guardian and the Observer
newspapers dating back to 1791 including around 13 million articles. Includes
information on big world affairs such as politics, sport, business, culture and
science but also the important milestones in the lives of some people including
birth and wedding announcements and obituaries.
You can subscribe for 1 day, 3 days or a month.
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A Woman Reading a Newspaper, by Norman Garstin, 1891
(Oil on Wood). Wikimedia Commons
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England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man
1.
The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazette
Search and view for free
This has a special feature whereby you can search by
event such as World I, World War II, Boer War 1889-1902, Great Fire of London
1666 (issue 85), First Awards of the Victoria Cross 1857 (issue 21971) and
Battle of Trafalgar 1805 (issue 15858). The London
Gazette has an index which is searchable from 1829 whilst the Edinburgh and Belfast Gazette indexes are searchable only from 2002.
2.
Some Local Papers – England
Free to search and view.
A few historic papers from England have been digitised
by volunteers in separate small projects and are available to view freely.
These include: The Teesdale Mercury
(1855-2005) , www.teesdalemercuryarchive.co.uk (Donations welcome);
The Halifax Weekly Courier (during
the period of the First World War) www.calderdale.go.uk/wtw/sources/themes/world-war-one.html and The Slough,
Eton and Windsor Observer, www.sloughhistoryonline.org.uk.
3.
National Library of Scotland
Free to search and view in the National Library of
Scotland. Register and pay to view online.
This digital collection includes items ranging from
the earliest newspaper printed in Scotland, to modern online titles. It also includes
hundreds of broadsides, the forerunners of tabloid newspapers. It includes
access to the British newspaper archive which includes such Scots titles as the
Ayr Advertiser, the Glasgow Herald and the Stirling Observer.
4.
The Scotsman
Free to register and search. Pay to view.
The Scotsman was
a liberal weekly broadsheet first issued in 1817. Searchable records go up to 1950. Subscription packages for 2 days, 7 days, 30
days and 12 months can be purchased.
5. Guide to Scottish Newspaper Indexes
This searchable list
provides details of Scottish newspaper titles that have an index. The indexes
themselves are likely to be card indexes kept in local archives.
6. Index of Newspapers from the Highlands and
Islands
www.ambaile.org.uk
Free to search.
A bilingual resource
in English and Gaelic. Includes an index to articles carried in the newspapers
of the Highlands and Islands between 1800-1939. Provides a summary of each
article and a reference to the issue in which it appeared. Includes The Inverness Journal (1807-1849); The John O’Groat Journal (1836-1887); The Inverness Advertiser (1849-1885); The Scottish Highlander (1885-1898); The Inverness Courier (1879, 1898-1901,
1920-1939); Gairm (1952-2002).
7.
The Welsh Newspaper Archive
Free to search and view
Over a million newspaper pages from nearly 120
newspapers up to 1910. This digital collection also includes newspaper content
from The Welsh Experience of World War
One Project. The first newspaper to be published in Wales was the Cambrian from 1804 in Swansea. This was
followed by The North Wales Gazette
(1808) and The Camarthen Journal (1810). The first Welsh language weekly was Seren Gomer in 1814 which saw itself as
a national newspaper for the whole of Wales.
8.
Cambrian
Index Online
Free to search.
The Cambrian Index database contains
hundreds of thousands of entries from newspapers relating to people and events
occurring in an area roughly represented by the former county of West
Glamorgan, Wales (mainly 1804-1881). All the newspaper's
reported birth, marriage and death entries are extracted and indexed,
regardless of location. Other articles are indexed by topic e.g. Transport,
Ships and Shipping, Disasters and Accidents etc.
9.
The Irish News Archive
Free to search. Pay to view.
Millions of newspaper pages from all over Ireland.
Includes a useful digital map so that you can see which newspapers were
published in which area. You can subscribe for one day, by month or by year.
10. The Irish 1916 Easter Rising News Archive
Free to
search and view.
Ireland’s
regional and daily newspapers during the 1916 Easter Rising. This includes the
text of 33 contemporary newspapers including: The Evening Herald, The Cork
Examiner and The Irish Independent.
11. Manx
National Heritage
www.imuseum.im
Free to search. Pay to view. Or free access within the
National Library and Archives of the Isle of Man, Manx Museum, Douglas, after
registering and obtaining a Reader’s card.
27 Manx newspaper titles from 1792-1960. You can
subscribe for 1 day, 7 days, 30 days or a year.
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New Zealand POWs arrive in Margate, Kent in April 1945. One reads a newspaper to pass the time spent queuing.
IWM Via Wikimedia Commons
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Specialist Interest
1. The Stage Archive
Free to search. Pay to view
The Stage Directory was founded in 1880 as a monthly paper. It previewed, reviewed, monitored, reported and analysed performance across the UK entertainment industry. If you had ancestors who trod the boards. This might be the place to find them. You can pay for a subscription for 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 1 year.
2. The Tablet
Free to search and view.
The entire text of the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, from 1840 to the present
day. Includes content written by some Popes and other well-known Catholic
writers.
3. Jewish Chronicle Archive
www.thejc.com
Free to search. Pay (by annual or newsagent subscription)
to view
Access content from the world’s oldest Jewish
newspaper from 1841 by clicking on a small icon on the top right of the home
page.
4. Last Chance to
Read
Free to view selected sections of pages. Pay (by Paypal) to view
and download whole pages.
A searchable collection of thousands of pages of British and
Irish newspapers and other publications (1710 – 1900). Includes some scarce
newspapers (of which very few copies were originally printed) such as Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, Hue and Cry and Police Gazette, and The Craftsman or Say’s Weekly Journal.
Newspaper
Indexes
Digitised newspapers can generally be searched online by
keyword. However, where the text of the newspapers is not in itself online,
there are sometimes ways of making a search of microfiches (or old newspapers
themselves) easier. Some old newspapers have been helpfully indexed by
archivists and librarians. You should take a look online at the library
holdings in the town in which you are interested.
The detail included in these indexes varies. They
might, for instance, simply include entries for the main topics covered by the
newspaper, or they might include entries for every name mentioned. Some of
these indexes have now been digitised and can be accessed directly online (The
Cambrian Index Online mentioned above is one such). Other ‘guides to indexes’
appear online. An example is a list of newspaper indexes held by Bolton Library
and Museum Service (wwwboltonlams.co.uk). In this case, the indexes themselves
(often still in card format) can only be accessed by visiting the Archive and
Local Studies Search Room.
Link to buy my books online UK http://amzn.to/2fDT1gJ
Link to buy my books online USA https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00LSGAMZS
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