British Newspaper Archive

The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) has now been operating for over 3 years – have you had a look at it yet? It was launched on 29 November 2011 with 4 million historic newspaper pages and has grown to over 9 million fully searchable pages available from 300 British and Irish titles. The newspapers cover 1710 – 1954, a much broader time period than at launch. 

The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection over the next 10 years.
You can search - 
News Articles - read about national events, as well as issues of local and regional importance. News articles are your window into daily life in historical Britain.
Family Notices - search your family's birth, marriage and death notices plus related announcements including engagements, anniversaries, birthdays and congratulations.
Letters - read letters to the editor written by the newspaper's readers, including illumination contemporary debates, aspirations and anxieties.
Obituaries - view a wealth of contemporary information on the lives of notable individuals and ancestors.
Advertisements - these include classifieds, shipping notices and appointments. There are illustrations - see photographs, engravings, graphics, maps and editorial cartoons. 

British Newspapers

Find My Past has entered an exclusive partnership with the British National Library to provide access to British newspapers. The collection will cover local and regional newspapers in the UK dating from 1700 to 1950. The Statistics covering this project are staggering. There are 65 million plus articles covering three centuries and 8000 new pages are scanned each day. The newspaper coverage will provide additional information on family members not found in official records.  

This collection is accessible in Manly Library through the Find My Past database. Log onto Find My Past through the Manly Library On-Line Databases and choose the Australian & New Zealand edition. Simply click on ‘British Newspapers’ in the top line to begin searching.

Given the rate of additions to this collection, it would be worth checking it every few months if your previous searches proved unsuccessful.

Irish American Weekly

Did you know that Irish deaths and marriages were routinely published in the pages of the Irish American Weekly (published in New York)?  The paper was published from 1849 to 1911 and this historical Irish newspaper is a great genealogical resource to find obituaries and marriages that occurred in Ireland and around the world during the time of its publication. The Irish American weekly made a diligent effort to find, document and publish these family records in Ireland and printed them in the pages of their New York city newspaper. It is now available online for searching.

Chronicling America: Newspapers online

The US is catching up to Australia in providing newspapers online. Chronicling America is a website maintained by the Library of Congress and provides free access to information about hsitoric American newspapers and select digitised newspaper pages from 1836 to 1922. It is produced by the Ntional Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NSNP, a partneship between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long term effort to develop an internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitisation of hsitoric pages. Supported by the NEH, this rich digitial resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of congress. an NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually , all U.S. states and territories.

With similarites to our National Library's trove website, you can spend hours finding all inds of data. Search terms are highlighted on the webpage, and type is easily manipulated for readability.

Certainly worth a look!