17 August 2024
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Excerpt from 4 April 1914 Penistone Stockbridge and Hoyland Express. Image published with permission of Findmypast
Historic newspapers can be mined for clues about the past in so many ways. As family historians we will often search them for details about our ancestors. Don't forget to study the pages of the past, in order to learn about the places your ancestors once lived too.
Find out which newspapers cover your place of interest
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.
Drill down to street name & searching the wider area
Searching the newspapers online allow you to search precisely what you are after. While the search results do sometimes get bad reports (for OCR mis-readings), the online newspaper search facilities usually provide a broad scope for searching.
You may decide to search on a property name, a business name or a street address. You may broaden this out to the wider parish, or suburb, to find out about the wider news. Reading about the parish or town, more widely is also useful. You will spot clues that give you useful guidance and insights about your ancestors' place, even if you can't find details precisely for their address. For instance, searching the town news, you may spot a mention of the first introduction of electric lighting to the town. From this you can deduce a 'not before' date, regarding when your ancestors would have had electric lighting in their homes.
Tip! Remember to search in the period before your ancestors lived in a place, to gain a fuller understanding of the area. If you learn for instance that the area formerly comprised fields, and that your ancestors were living in newly built housing, this will help you to visualise their locality.
Explore newspapers in conjunction with other records
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.
Being such comprehensive records, the census is also useful for searching to find evidence of property. Map collections, such as the detailed Ordnance Survey ones, are similarly useful - helping you to ascertain the earliest date from which a property existed. ie. if you are searching for a place in the newspapers, you need to try to establish when it was built, in order to set your newspaper datespan search effectively.
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.
Nonetheless, using these records in conjunction with newspapers will provide you with a background dataset of the population, upon which you can pin the colourful and interesting stories you find in the newspapers.
Learn more about using newspapers for family history research
Join us for Chris Paton's webinar, 17 August, 6.30pm UK time. Find out more here.
Where to find FREE online newspapers for history research
- Findmypast's free to view newspaper pages - while the majority of Findmypast's newspaper pages require payment, several million newspaper pages are available free to view. To access them, go to Findmypast's Advanced Newspaper Search and set the access to 'Free to view'.
- The Gazette is the official government publication dating back to the 17th century, and can be found free online.
- 15 million newspaper articles from the National Library of Wales at Welsh Newspapers Online
- National Library of Scotland newspaper collections - some pages are freely available online, such as the Scotland's News collection and the broadsides in the Word on the Street collection. If you live in Scotland and join the library you will gain access to many more newspapers. Find out more here
- The National Library of Australia’s Trove site.
- PapersPast from the National Library of New Zealand and the New Zealand Government.
- Chronicling America sponsored by the US Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities, covering 1756-1963.
Find out more about historic newspapers
Read The National Archives' free online guide to newspapers