How to use old newspapers for family history research

Just think of all the stories in one edition of a daily newspaper… then multiply that by thousands… upon thousands. It's no wonder newspapers are a brilliant resource for family historians, with huge archives of information waiting to be discovered, much of it now available online. 

Not only do they confirm dates and facts, they shed light on the places and periods in which our ancestors lived, adding colour and context to their lives, as Family Tree expert David Annal advises:

"The truth is that you just never know what you’ll find. Even if it’s something as seemingly insignificant as winning second prize for their parsnips in the annual district vegetable competition, or scoring 16 not out for the works cricket team, it was important to your ancestor at the time and you can imagine the pride they felt at seeing their name in print. It helps us to see them as real people and it adds an extra layer to the stories of their lives."

What newspaper archives are available?

There are a number of sources for newspaper archives, including from specific newspapers themselves. However, if searching for a specific ancestor or event, you may not know whether a particular newspaper covered the story, so more general archives are often more helpful.

Best newspaper archives (at a glance)

Archive	Coverage	Free?	Access	Good for
British Newspaper Archive (BNA)	UK & Ireland, 18th–20th c. (growing)	Search free; view by sub / library	Web, Findmypast	Local UK stories, BMD notices, court reports
The Gazette (London, Edinburgh, Belfast)	Official notices, 17th c.–present (varies)	Free	Web	Bankruptcies, military honours, legal notices
Irish Newspaper Archives	Ireland, 1738–present	Subscription	Web	Irish ancestors
Newspapers.com	Primarily US; some UK & global titles	Trial; then paid	Web (Ancestry ecosystem)	US ancestors, wide title range
Welsh Newspapers Online	Wales to 1910 (English & Welsh)	Free	Web	Welsh local history, bilingual searches
National Library of Scotland	Scottish titles & indexes	Mostly free discovery	Web / on-site	Scottish press coverage
Trove (Australia)	Australian newspapers & gazettes	Free	Web	Australian family & local history
Papers Past (New Zealand)	NZ newspapers	Free	Web	NZ ancestors, migration stories
Chronicling America	Historic US newspapers	Free	Web	19th–early 20th c. US coverage
Gale / ProQuest	Major titles; often via libraries	Often free via library	Institution access	Scholarly, national titles (e.g., The Times)

Tip: Many public libraries and universities provide free on-site access to paid newspaper archives. Check your local library’s e-resources.

 

The British Newspaper Archive (BNA)

The British Newspaper Archive (BNA), provided jointly by the British Library and Findmypast, holds tens of millions of reports, advertisements and notices that can help you break down brick walls, and tell richer ​family stories. The collection is continually growing with new records being added.

The records are free to search online and you can buy monthly or yearly subscriptions or 'Pay As You Go' on the British Newspaper Archive site. The newspaper collection is also included in a Findmypast subscription.

Here's how to view records for free…

• Login to Findmypast (if you've not already done so you'll need to register to login, but you don't need to subscribe). 
• Then go to www.findmypast.co.uk/search-newspapers/advanced
• Enter your search terms. Near the bottom of the search fields, toggle access from 'All' to 'Free to view'.

The BNA is 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

The Archive has a number of speciality titles which are particularly suited to family history research.  

• Sports newspapers such as the Sporting Times are excellent for tracing athletic ancestors
• If your ancestors trod the boards search for reviews in The Stage and The Era
• For those with seafaring ancestors Lloyd’s List is an essential resource. This newspaper reported on the movement of ships whose home ports were in the UK and Ireland
• Dedicated Crime titles are filled with notices of suspicious persons and rewards for the return of stolen goods.  The Illustrated Police News also gives lurid accounts of infamous crimes
• The Poor Law Union Gazette is a rich resource for family historians, particularly for those where families were broken up by poverty.  The paper publishes notices of men and women who absconded from their families, including names and physical descriptions

You can find a full list of the newspaper titles covered on the BNA website.

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The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazette

The Gazette was the first official journal of record and the newspaper of the Crown.

Its website 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)
• Battle of Trafalgar 1805 (issue 15858)

The London Gazette has an index that is searchable from 1829 while the Edinburgh and Belfast Gazette indexes are searchable only from 2002. All articles are free to search and view: www.thegazette.co.uk

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Newspapers.com

Published by ancestry, the newspapers.com website is said to be the largest online newspaper archives in the world. The collection has many US titles, but also boasts a range of newspapers that are/were based in the United Kingdom, such as The Guardian.

A subscription is required but the site offers a 7-day free trial: www.newspapers.com

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Scottish newspapers

Find details of Scottish newspapers archives at the National Library of Scotland: www.nls.uk/family-history/newspapers

You can also see a list of Scottish newspaper titles that have an index.

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Welsh Newspapers Online

This fully searchable website run by the National Library of Wales features 1.1 million pages from nearly 120 newspaper titles up to 1910, including some English as well as Welsh publications. The digital collection also features 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 Wales.

The website is completely free to search and view: newspapers.library.wales

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Irish Newspaper Archives

The Irish Newspaper Archives provides access to newspapers from 1738 all the way up to current day; over 6 million pages of newspaper content from titles North and South of the Irish border.

A digital subscription gives you access to all titles within the archive, you can then print, email or save these articles.  

Find out more at: www.irishnewsarchive.com

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Other online newspaper archives

• The largest collection of local newspapers in Northern Ireland is held in the Newspaper library in Belfast Central Library.
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers
• The Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection at the Library of Congress.
• Australian newspapers and gazettes can be found at Trove.
• The Times Digital Archive hosted by Gale, part of Cengage Group.
• PapersPast from the National Library of New Zealand and the New Zealand Government.

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What you can find in newspaper archives

There is a wealth of information to be found in newspaper archives, including the following:

• Birth, marriage & death notices: These appear regularly after 1820 and also include announcements about family members who have moved abroad
• Civil & army promotions: If your ancestor was in the civil service or military services, their promotions and movements can be followed in the newspapers
• Advertisements: Early advertisements relied on words rather than images to get their message across and these story-like advertisements can give you great insight into your ancestor’s business dealings
• Debtors: The names and addresses of borrowers and money-lenders were printed in newspapers
• Court reports: These feature regularly in newspapers and contain the names of defendants, victims and witnesses.  Court reports often give physical descriptions of defendants, and report testimonies, allowing you to ‘hear’ your ancestor’s voice
• Charitable donations and subscription lists:  You will find long lists of names in the newspapers acknowledging contributions to charity and group membership
• Public meetings:  The minutes of public meetings are reported in newspapers and usually name the committee members
• News: News stories big and small, local, regional, national and international were reported in the papers

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Family history clues from newspapers

As well as adding colour and context, newspapers can provide us with more specific dates, allowing us to confirm information we may have found in other records.

1. Birth notices usually include the names of both parents 
2. Marriage notices may mention guests (ie friends and family members) 
3. Marriage notices may even mention what the bride & groom and other members of the wedding party were wearing
4. Notices of anniversaries and other special events will reveal what your ancestors deemed important
5. Details of ships sailing may provide clues for emigrating or immigrating ancestors, or occupation-related clues for those who worked on the seas.

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Before you start searching newspaper archives

The growth over the last decade of sites such as the British Newspaper Archive , as well as the many titles that were previously microfilmed through the British Library’s Newsplan project, has absolutely opened up a huge repository of material for our needs, writes Chris Paton.

But what happens if you can't find a newspaper story or report that you're sure should exist? Read on for questions to ask yourself to help hone your search and save yourself hours of fruitless searching.

Am I looking in the right place?

If a story we believe to have been published in a particular newspaper cannot be found through these means, does this mean that we are perhaps looking in the wrong title, or that it perhaps was never printed?

Not necessarily. Let us first cast aside for now the most obvious consideration that what is online and what has been microfilmed remains a drop in the ocean compared to what the British Library actually holds at its newspaper repository at Boston Spa in Yorkshire, not to mention within other archives.

Quite separate to this are other considerations to take into account with the materials that have been made more easily available for access. The following is a good example from some research I carried out over ten years ago for a client.

I was asked to find a specific series of weekly articles from the late 1930s in a Glasgow based newspaper called the Evening Times, entitled ‘Viewpoints of Scotland’, which concerned trigonometry points found at the top of many hills across the country which have been used to help determine their heights, and from which the distance to other notable features in the landscape may have been recorded. My client had one example from a series of twenty articles; could I find the others?

I visited the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and called up the microfilm in question, thinking it would be a relatively straightforward affair to locate them. After two hours of finding nothing, bar a letter thanking the editor for publishing the series (!), I asked the librarian if I could perhaps see the original bound volume of the title in question. I was amusingly advised that this was not necessary, as the records had been microfilmed! After explaining my predicament, I was eventually able to view the volume, and with ten minutes had found all twenty articles in the series.

So, what had been the problem?

The articles had been published each Saturday, but when the newspaper was microfilmed, those photographing the collection opted to image only the edition retained little from the earlier versions, other than the first couple of pages of news, with the rest of the copy subsequently given over to coverage of the day’s sporting events. It transpired that the Viewpoints articles were published in the first run of the paper on a Saturday only, and then removed from subsequent later editions.

Thankfully the bound volumes of the newspapers contained every version of the title from that day, and thus I was soon able to locate the desired articles.

Is my search actually picking up the story in question?

This is not the only problem with newspapers. On websites such as the British Newspaper Archive, the story you are seeking may well be where you think it is, but is not being picked up in searches because the technology used to index the content (called Optical Character Recognition) has simply not recognised some of the words when digitised.

It is sometimes possible to locate the article in question by using a different search term – an address instead of a person’s name, for example. But even then, some stories are still missed because they have been scanned from a large bound volume, and having appeared right in the middle where the pages curve inwards to the spine, they have been distorted when photographed, with the OCR technology simply unable to make sense of the curved words presented.

Could I search smarter?

Sometimes forgetting about doing a search at all can be a better approach, with browsing the full page in question a much more productive strategy, but even then, you may still encounter problems.

The above example typically flags up so many issues found in other documentary collections and types found elsewhere. What is actually included in a collection, how has it been photographed or digitised, and what are the flaws in the technologies that have been employed to try to make them more accessible, and which do not always succeed?

Armed with an idea about the potential pitfalls in the processes employed to make records more accessible, you can adapt your approach to carry out different strategies to try to locate particular records of interest, and become a better researcher as a consequence.

'Before you start searching newspaper archives' adapted from Chris Paton's article in the May 2021 issue of Family Tree magazine.

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How to search newspaper archives (step-by-step)

1. Pick the right archive: start with local/regional titles for the place and date range.
2. Set dates wisely: search a +/- 5–10 year window; remember events may be reported later.
3. Try variants: surname only (Mr Smith), initials (A. G. Wilkinson), maiden names, nicknames.
4. Search by place & address: street names, parishes, pubs, works teams, employers.
5. Use period language: e.g., “consumption” (TB), “lunatic asylum,” “Great War,” “motor-car.”
6. Work around OCR: swap to browsing; scan adjacent editions; try wildcards (Wilkin*).
7. Capture the citation: title, place, date, page/column; screenshot or clipping tool.

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Using newspapers to find out about an ancestor's hometown

Newspapers can give you a real insight into the place where your ancestors worked and lived.

• When first searching a place, investigate which papers have been published in that area. Remember that newspapers are very likely to have been amalgamated, and to have come and gone. So check which newspapers are available for your place and time period of interest. 
   
• Remember that street names may well have changed. Before diving into the online newspaper collections be sure to track down a map of the area for the era you wish to search. The map will show you which street and place names you need to search on for a particular time period.
   
• You can just search for a place or street name, or combine your search with a specific event, for instance ‘Corby AND Coronation’. Feeling brave? You could search on your street name, combined with terms that might reveal crimes and misdemeanours.
   
• In addition to searching for a street name, perhaps expand your search to include the local area ­– to gain a feel for the community (the local market, shops, entertainment and sporting fixtures) and to understand how national events affected it too (from the Coronation, to the world wars).
   
• Remember that news was often reported far and wide, so expand your search beyond the local county paper (this can be particularly useful if the digitised collections for the area you’re researching are a little lean).
   
• Don’t just search – take the time to browse. Browsing through the pages of an old newspaper will give you hints and insights that you will never have thought to search for and give you a richer understanding of the area.
   

• When searching historic newspapers to learn about the areas in which your ancestors once lived, but sure to research them in conjunction with other historic records. 
  
  Census records will be helpful in populating the area - giving you a flavour of the people, their ages and occupations.
  
  Electoral rolls will name selected members of the community, according to voting eligibility. Similarly trade directories will name a subset of the local community - ie just the people trading and business, or notable figures of the community, and, if a residents' listing just, effectively, the head of each household.

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Historic newspaper search tips

The late 19th century was the heyday of the newspaper and local papers flourished.  But these historical newspapers differ from modern newspapers in a few ways, and it is helpful to understand these differences as you begin searching.  

Historic newspapers were often only four pages long and carried advertisements and notices on the front page rather than a ‘cover story’.  While you will find some beautiful engravings particularly as part of advertisements, there were few photographs until after 1910. 

The expense of producing the newspaper meant that the text is often densely packed to make the most of the available space, there are few headlines and each story is followed closely by the next.  

Newspapers were the main source for all news and entertainment and they often published stories and poetry.  

Here are a few tips for getting the most out of historical newspapers: 

• Don’t restrict yourself to your local paper: Newspapers printed stories from all over the country; it is not unusual to find a story from Scotland published in a local paper from Devon.
• Use surnames to search:  In the 19th century first names were not always published.  Your ancestor could be known as Mr. Smith, or ‘a young lady called Smith’.
• Language: Some of the language used can be unfamiliar and the names by which we know a historical event might not be the name used to describe it when it happened. For example, World War One was the Great War.
• Optical Character Recognition: Newspapers are made searchable using OCR; fuzzy or blurred print can make it difficult for the computer to translate the text.  Keep this in mind when searching.  Luckily several newspapers will often report on the same event.
• Don’t forget to ask whether relatives have kept newspaper cuttings from the past about family members – and request copies!
• Keep checking online archives such as the British Newspaper Archive and the Wales Newspapers Online project for new additions – more digitised pages are added every day!
• Make sure you keep a careful record of the sources you locate online – it’s easy to lose track and go over old ground.

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