The Northern Star, 2nd December 1837. Via Wikimedia Commons.You may be only a few keyboard strokes away
from finding out much more about the events, incidents and background of your
ancestor’s life. That’s because one of the easiest ways of enriching your
knowledge about your family in the past is by looking at relevant newspaper
accounts. And, today, there are several online sources which allow you to access
some of these papers quickly, cheaply (and sometimes even for free) from the
comfort of your own living room.
References in newspapers to individual
ancestors might include announcements of births, marriages or deaths as well as
longer obituaries – these might give more factual information about your
ancestors’ key dates than the certificates you already have. More excitingly,
he or she might have been hailed as local hero for some reason or another, fined
for some misdemeanour, imprisoned for a crime, or injured in an accident. A
relative’s business or place of work might be named in adverts or legal notices;
his or her words as a witness at an event might be recorded. Depending on time
and place, all of these kinds of stories regularly turned up in the press in
the past.
And even if you don’t find the name of an
individual ancestor, newspapers can provide a whole host of detail about the community
in which he or she was living. No other resource allows you so clearly to experience
the life of your family in the past. At the very least, remember that a local
newspaper would probably have been your ancestor’s only window on the wider world
in eras before the advent of radio, television and other news media.
History of Newspapers in Britain
Newspapers – in the sense of regular periodic
printed accounts of important happenings - started in Britain in the seventeenth century
but don’t expect to see information about your relatives in these very early
pages ! At first, papers provided news only from the court and then from London
more generally, so you won’t find anything relating to an ‘ordinary’ provincial
ancestor within them.
As time went on, however, more and more
newspapers were produced, first in London, then in other major cities and in
smaller towns. The price of newspapers was high – at roughly 7 pence, they were
beyond the means of the average man - since proprietors were subject to various
government taxes. Nevertheless, the new papers were starting to give voice to a
lively variety of different political, religious and geographical viewpoints. It
was not until all newspaper taxes were dropped in 1855 that the sheer number of
titles available and the average circulation of newspapers increased massively.
The advent of universal state education in
1870 led to far greater numbers of working-class newspaper readers after this date
and the likelihood of you finding an ‘ordinary’ ancestor within a newspaper
increases exponentially as we approach the mid-twentieth century. With the
increase in the availability of news came an expansion in its content so that
sport and entertainment now featured alongside (and sometimes even dominated)
accounts of political and social events. Improvements in rail communication, printing
and in the quality of journalism itself further boosted newspaper numbers and readership
figures.
There is much to be said for simply browsing newspapers
online and seeing what turns up, but if you are intent on finding out something
fairly specific about the lives of your ancestors, take a little time first to
jot down what you already know about him or her (in terms of locality, time
period and cultural background) in order to start your search in the right
place.
*Ask yourself about which town or county your
ancestor would have been living in – and be aware of changing geographical
boundaries: Liverpool, for example, would have appeared in Lancashire papers. It’s
worth checking with a library or historical institution local to where your
ancestor came from to see which newspapers may have serviced that area. Some
newspaper titles had longevity, others lasted only a few years, or even a few
months.
Consider the time period in which your
ancestor lived. If he fought in World War One, you might want to give special
attention to newspapers from that era (see particularly the newspapers
available at www.ancestry.co.uk).
Ask yourself whether your ancestor was a
member of a particular ethnic, cultural, religious, social or political group? A
Catholic ancestor, for example, might have read or appeared in The Tablet,
a Jewish ancestor in the Jewish Chronicle, or a relative with Communist
leanings, the Daily Worker. *
The British Newspaper Archive and Find My
Past
A good place to start your research is at the
British Newspaper Archive online https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/.
This site is the result of a partnership between the British Library and FindMyPast
(www.findmypast.co.uk/). The same content is, therefore, available by subscription
to the FindmyPast website.
In both cases, whilst searching is free,
actually viewing a relevant newspaper page involves a fee. You can pay a
monthly subscription, or a year’s subscription (currently between £12-£14 a
month on BNA or FindmyPast Pro Subscription). There is also a
Pay-AS-YOU-GO option on both sites,
should you only wish to view a very small number of pages. The resource
includes over 45 million pages of local and regional papers across England,
Scotland and Wales from 1699 to 2009. A recent addition to the collection is the
archive of the Scotland’s oldest national newspaper, The Scotsman, from
1817-1950.
A million pages have been made available for
free, with the promise of another million free pages to be added every year for
the next four years. These papers range
in date from 1720-1880. The latter date (now more than 140 years ago) is
considered a safe date before which all material is out of copyright.
Each page has been completely digitised and you
can search by a keyword such as your ancestor's name, the
address at which he lived, the company for which he worked or an
association or interest group with which he was associated. You can download
relevant pages to your computer, print them out for safekeeping and even send them
to other interested family members by email or other messaging system.
Don’t assume that every page of every
newspaper ever published is already available online. The collection is growing
all the time – indeed it is increasing at the rate of half a million pages per
month - so if the paper you want has not
yet appeared, keep checking the sites from time to time to see if it has been
added.
The Genealogist (www.genealogist.co.uk)
This is a good place to start if your
ancestor experienced the First World War. Accessible to its Diamond Subscribers
(for a fee of roughly £400 per annum), online newspapers here include (but are
not limited to) : The Illustrated War News (1914-1918), The Great War
(1914-1919), War Illustrated (1914-1919). Also available on this site
are editions of the Illustrated London News (1842-1919) and the Jewish
Chronicle from (1905-1908).
Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk)
Ancestry has significant holding of papers
from Scotland and Northern Ireland. These include: The Dunfermline Journal
(1851-1931); The Belfast Newsletter (1738-1925) and a selection of
Edinburgh papers (the Advertiser, Courant, Evening Courant,
Chronicle, Evening Chronicle and Weekly Journal) from
various dates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ancestry also holds
copies of The Times (1788-1833); and ad hoc papers from Liverpool and
Staffordshire.
*Other
Online Newspaper Archives
There are a few online newspaper archives
that house only a selected number of titles or even one title. Before taking out
a subscription to any of these, check to see if your local library provides
them for free (access might be in the library itself or at home online via a
library membership number). Libraries in UK Institutions of Further and Higher
Education might also allow access to certain newspaper databases and can
sometime be accessed for free for non-members with a daily or weekly Reader
Card.
The UK Press Archive (www.ukpressonline) 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). This can be accessed
via a private annual or 6 month subscription, or free through a subscribing
public library.
The Times
Digital Archive (https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-times-digital-archive) provides the content of the world’s longest standing
continuously running newspaper from 1785-2019. Access is only through
subscribing institutions.
The Welsh Newspaper Archive, (www.newspapers.library.wales/) includes over 15 million
newspaper articles in Welsh and English speaking papers. Free to search and
view.
The Jewish
Chronicle Archive (www.thejc.com/archive) provides
online access to the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper from 1841. This is free to
search. Viewers must be subscribers of the paper or pay £2.50 per viewing
session.
The Tablet (www://archive.thetablet.co.uk)/ The entire text of
the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, from 1840 to the present day. Access
is by subscription.
The Guardian (1821-2003)
and Observer (1791-1923) Digital Archive (www.theguardian.newspapers.com) Papers date back to 1791 including around 13
million articles. Free to search/pay to view.
The National Library of Scotland (www.nls.uk/collections/newspapers/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. Free to search/pay to view.
Manx National
Heritage (www.imuseum.im) 27 Manx newspaper
titles from 1792-1960 have recently been made free to search and view.
If you can’t find a newspaper from
the locality you are looking for, it’s worth doing a general Google search. A
few miscellaneous papers have been digitised by volunteers and are often available
to view freely. One of these is the
independent local newspaper The Teesdale Mercury (1855-2005) (www.teesdalemercuryarchive.org.uk) which provides the information for free but encourages donations.
Whilst searching newspapers is one of the easiest
ways of enriching your family history research, there are some potential
pitfalls.
Fake News ?
Always treat a newspaper article with a
degree of scepticism. It’s easy to get over-excited if you spot your ancestor’s
name in a page of newspaper text but be careful not to jump to conclusions. Even
if the name seems a particularly uncommon one to you, there may have been many
people in a local area with the same name.
Be aware that newspaper copy might be
superficial or full of errors. It might have been written as a method of
propaganda, or might have been subject to censorship, for example, not all
bombing raids during the Second World War were reported in the press for fear
of lowering public morale.
Think carefully about the kind of the paper
that you are looking at. Was it local, regional, or national? Is it likely to
have had a particular religious or political bias? You might need to look at a
number of reports of the same event or incident in different papers in order to
piece together a more accurate picture of what actually happened.
Caught on a Technicality ?
Newspapers online have been scanned from microfilms of original papers
and made into pdfs or similar. They have been indexed using Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) technology. Since this is only 98-99% accurate, mistakes will
occasionally be found. The BNA/FindmyPpst encourages reporting of these mistakes.
Additionally, zooming in on articles can require patience whilst a new ‘tile’
loads.
At the moment there is no facility at the BNA/Findmypast to print out
individual articles from a newspaper, but whole pages can be printed, and the
site gives advice on how you can clip out the article you wish for yourself.
You can send articles to friends and post them to social media providing you
cite the BNA/FindmyPast and include the copyright reference number given for
each page on the site.
Annotated Document
Manchester
Evening News, 27th December 1927
Annotations
1.
Special Occasions
Look
out for anniversaries (eg. Silver and Golden Weddings). These were celebrated
more publicly from the 1920s onwards. This page also includes the local ‘Rolls
of Honour, Births, Marriages and Deaths and In Memoriam Notices.’
2.
Photographs
You
may be surprised to come across previously unseen photographs of your ancestors
in early twentieth-century papers.
3.
Hard facts [The Golden Wedding Anniversary notice of
Mr and Mrs Shawcross ]
Gives the
date and address of the church in which the couple married, their home address,
her occupation, his occupation, his employer’s name, length of service, and
date of retirement.
4.
‘Soft’ (opinion) details [The Shawcross notice
and separately The Hardcastle notice. Tells
us the opinion that Mrs Shawcross was a ‘well-known’ midwife.
Tells
us the opinion that the Hardcastle couple were in ‘good health.’
5.
Adjacent articles [Shawcross notice and Hardcastle
notice] The Shawcross and Hardcastle husbands
worked in the same occupation and business (as dyers for Messrs Worrall Ltd of
Ordsall Lane) and the two couples married at approximately the same time.
Perhaps they were relations or friends as well as work colleagues?
6.
Flavour of a locality and an era
This
page describes various features of life in Manchester over the Christmas Bank Holiday
of 1927 including leisure activities such as pantomimes, charabanc tours, golf,
rambling and cycling, football and horse-racing results. The page also covers profit-sharing
paid to the employees of Hartley’s Jam Factory in Aintree, Liverpool, local
accidental deaths and some news from abroad (an attack on a postal van in
Paris).
BIOGRAPHY: John Gilbert: Newspaper
Wood Engraver (1817-1897)
Before the technology was invented to include photographs in
newspapers, newspaper editors relied on drawings produced from wood engravings.
One of the most prolific newspaper artists was John Gilbert, born in
Blackheath, Surrey in 1817. Gilbert’s first job as an estate agent did not suit
him at all. He spent every spare minute drawing and painting in watercolours
and oils, chiefly copying prints from books. His skills were such that by 1836,
he was exhibiting at the Society of British Artists and two years later at the
Royal Academy.
Gilbert’s later talent for wood engraving resulted in commissions
from Punch, but he produced far more illustrations for the press after
newsagent and printer Herbert Ingram commissioned woodcut images on the
subject of a royal masquerade ball to be held on Thursday May 12th 1842.
Working from written descriptions of the historical costumes that the guests were
expected to wear, Gilbert speedily drew the illustrations directly onto woodblocks.
The first edition of the Illustrated London News was launched that very
weekend with Gilbert’s pictures ensuring an avid and interested readership. A
long career as a news illustrator with that paper and with the London
Journal followed.
Outside the world of newspapers, Gilbert
produced illustrations for published editions of all the English poets
including almost 750 images for an edition of Shakespeare. First President of St Martin’s School of Art (founded in 1854), President
of the Royal Watercolour Society (1871), and knighted in 1872, unmarried Gilbert died in 1897.
Resources
1. Local Newspapers
1750-1920: A Select Location List: England and Wales, Channel Islands, Isle of
Man (Guides for Genealogists, Family and Local Historians) compiled by Jeremy Gibson, Brett Langston and Brenda W Smith. The
Family History Partnership, 2011. Describes precisely by county and local area
what newspapers were published and when.
2. Historical Research Using British
Newspapers by Denise
Bates, Pen and Sword 2016. Looks at how newspapers can provide forgotten
details and new insights into historical events and examines the pros and cons
of using newspapers as a resource.
3. Read All About It!:
A History of the British Newspaper, by Kevin Williams, Routledge,
2009. Looks at the way newspapers have changed in form, style, content and
relationship to government since their inception in the seventeenth century.
4. The Science
Museum Digital Library https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/digital-library.
Registered readers of
the Science Museum have free access to the British Newspaper Archive (on site
at the Museum) in addition to other online resources.
5. Boston Spa Library
(https://www.bl.uk/visit/reading-rooms/boston-spa). The British Library, Boston Spa, Wetherby LS23 7BQ. This is the physical
home of the UK national newspaper collection. A Reader Pass is required to
enter – see website for details. Actual newspapers can be read here, and there
is free access to the British Newspaper Archive online.
Step By Step
Step One
Access the British Newspaper Archive
Online at www.findmypast.co.uk or at https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/. Type the name of
your ancestor into the search box. On the BNA site, you should surround the
name with inverted commas (these limit
the results to those where both words appear together) eg. “Charles Terrell”.
You will probably see a large number of results – in this case 17.
Step Two
Reduce the number of results by
checking/ticking one or more of the filter options displayed on the right-hand
side of the page, eg time period, article type, region, place, name of
newspaper, access type (whether free to view or not). The number of results
will drop to a more manageable level – in this case, using the time period
filter 1900-1949 – in this case 11.
Step Three
Read through the brief details of
each result. Identify those that look most promising. Click to view (if you are
already a subscriber to the site), or click to access Pay-As-You-Go.
Did You Know ?
Print runs
of the Times and the Telegraph quickly reached more than 100,000
in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Author Byline
Ruth A Symes is a freelance
writer and historian. Her books include Tracing Your Ancestors Through
Letters and Personal Writings (Pen and Sword, 2016)
Keywords: Newspapers, news, nineteenth century, twentieth century, eighteenth century, Britain, British, John Gilbert, engravings, England, English, births, marriages, deaths, UK, wedding anniversaries, press, British Newspaper Archive, ancestors, ancestry, forebears, media, regional, local, family history research, genealogy, searchmyancestry, who do you think you are, long lost family
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