British Newspaper Archives - What I Like and Don't Like About this Site

Today's Featured Database is British Newspaper Archive

I subscribed to the site several months ago and am delighted with the items I'm finding on ancestors. They are busy adding new pages daily and state that they have 5,329,460 scanned pages as of today.

In my first month of use, I encountered a problem. When I clicked on a "hit" for an ancestor, I could not find his name in the newspaper page that loaded. I read the entire page several times and even clicked back and forth a few pages but to no avail.

So I wrote to explain that I'd been hunting for over an hour and could not find the entry. To my surprise, their customer service responded very quickly and were extremely helpful.  Even after I was given the correct page and URL to view it, I couldn't spot the name. I finally decided I was too frustrated to continue hunting and wrote back to request more guidance. The very patient customer service rep provided me with an exact column number and start of the paragraph containing my ancestor's name. With that help I was able to spot the bit I needed.

Since then I've had no problems with an incorrect link and I've looked at many. With both my maternal grandparents being born in England I've got a lot of English ancestors to look for!

I like their search engine. You can narrow your search with filters for date, region, county, specific place, type of article, public tags, or specific newspapers.  Once you find an entry you want to view, you simply load the page. Sometimes your search term is highlighted but not always. Usually the block of text where your search word is located is a darker grey, but again this does not always happen. The majority of the time it does and that makes finding the entry much easier.

You can order a copy of the newspaper page for a fee or you can download it to your computer. Downloading it does not give you a very clear image so what I do is enlarge the bit I want then do a screen dump. It gives a better image than downloading. If there was something really special I wanted to save I'd pay for a better copy.

The one caveat you should be aware of is that when you purchase an unlimited membership, it's not really unlimited. As the website points out in their Terms, unlimited membership is subject to their  Fair Usage Policy.  This policy spells out that you are permitted to view an average of 1000 pages per month (calculated over a 3 month period). If you get close to the limit, the company will send you an email to warn you.

Personally I don't like paying for something that is called Unlimited when it isn't unlimited. No matter how nicely the site explains it, I felt tricked that they didn't just call it the "1000 pages per month membership" or "Sort of kind of unlimited membership" or something totally upfront and transparent.  

Yes I did purchase an Unlimited Membership but the smaller credit options wouldn't have been enough for me given the sheer number of English ancestors I want to hunt for. And I don't like subscription websites where I have to buy x number of credits and woe is me if they expire before I use them all. Because I'm very apt to forget or get busy and lose credits. 

So the bottom line is that I'm very happy with the site and with my "unlimited" membership (even though it isn't unlimited) and I've never been warned that I'm at my 1000 monthly views limit.  But I still wish they'd come up with a more honest name for it. Or remove the limit.

Tutorial: Using British Newspapers 1800-1900

British Newspapers, 1800-1900 is a fantastic site with over two million pages of 19th century newspapers. However with such a large database it becomes nessasary to find ways of narrowing your search so you can find the info you want quickly.

One way to narrow your search is to Browse publication by location. This will allow you to narrow your search to the geographical location that you are interested in. To do this simply choose the Browse by Location tab located in the navigation bar near the top of the screen. This will bring you up a map of England, Scotland and Ireland. On the map you will find blue icons that correspond to newspapers for that location. For example if you click on London you will get a list of London newspapers to choose from.

If you find you are interested in one of the Newspapers simply click on it and it will take you to a page containing information on that paper. You will also find several different ways to search the paper depending on your personal preference.

On the left you will find a search box labeled Search within this publication. This will allow you to search the entire database for that newspaper. So for example if you are looking for any Smiths that were ever mentioned in that newspaper this will bring them all up.

However you can also search a specific issue of the paper. This feature is handy when you are looking for a event that you have a good idea of the date. For example if you are looking for an obit for great grandpa smith and you know he died on October 15th 1900 then you would go and look at first issue published after that date. To search a specific date, simply start back on the page containing the information on that paper. If you look down the page you will see an About this Publication box that you can use to pick the publication date of your choice.

I'm hoping to explore British Newspapers 1800-1900 more fully over the next week and will post about my experiences plus any tips I can share to help genealogists use this wonderful website!

British Newspapers, 1800-1900 available online

The following press release about British Newspapers 1800-1900 was sent to Olive Tree Genealogy from Gale, part of Cengage Learning. I explored the site briefly and was very impressed! My first experiences using the site will be published here tomorrow so stay tuned!

Farmington Hills, MI, September 24, 2009 – Gale, part of Cengage Learning, along with The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have made nineteenth-century British newspapers available on the internet. The database, known as British Newspapers, 1800-1900 gives users access to over two million newspaper pages from 49 different national and regional newspapers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Chosen by leading experts and academics, the newspapers represent a cross-section of nineteenth-century society and contain illustrated materials on a variety of topics, including business, sports, politics and entertainment.

Providing the historical news content needed to track the lives of ancestors, “British Newspapers, 1800-1900” is a powerful new resource for genealogists and family historians, providing access to property and legal notices, marriage and birth announcements, illustrations and photographs. Users are able to search for relatives by name or keyword with additional resources available including biographies, timelines and publication histories.

This web site also offers users a unique opportunity to travel back in time to uncover rarely read accounts of nineteenth-century events as if they were historians stumbling upon long-lost artifacts. Whether it be a fascination with the East End of London at the time of the Whitechapel murders, “the hunting grounds of some of the lowest and most degraded types of humanity” (Penny Illustrated Paper, Sept. 1888), or an affinity for Civil War history and Abraham Lincoln, a man who “had in him not only the sentiments which women love, but the heavier metal of which full-grown men and Presidents are made” (Penny Illustrated Paper, Oct. 1861), this database offers historians, genealogists, researchers and anyone with a curiosity for nineteenth-century history the opportunity to read first-hand accounts of momentous events.

Many key anniversaries and world-changing events -- the Economic Panics of 1857 and 1873, the abolition of slavery, the Great Potato Famine, the California Gold Rush, the settling of the American frontier and many more -- are documented and available via a few keystrokes. Users can also access work from celebrated authors of the nineteenth-century, including Charles Dickens and William Thackeray.

“‘British Newspapers, 1800-1900’ places the fascinating events of the nineteenth century at the fingertips of genealogists, researchers, historians and consumers,” said Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher, Gale. “We are honored to be able to give audiences around the world access to content that was once only available to a small audience who had access to local library reading rooms in the United Kingdom.”

To make this collection available to users, Gale turned The British Library's collection of nineteenth-century newspapers into a high-resolution digital format with searchable images. The database presents online access to a key set of primary sources for the study of nineteenth-century history. For the 49 newspapers selected, every front page, editorial, birth and death notice, advertisement and classified ad that appeared within their pages is easily accessible from what is a virtual chronicle of history for this period. Users of the database can search every word on every page.

“This web site was developed with the researcher in mind,” said Simon Bell, Head of Strategic Licensing and Partnerships, The British Library. “There is a huge appetite for wider online access to this kind of resource and we are pleased that so many researchers and journalists have used the web site to research material which enables users across the world to delve into this unrivaled online resource.”

Searches of the site are free and downloads of full-text articles are available by purchasing either a 24-hour pass or a seven-day pass. Content from The Penny Illustrated Paper and The Graphic is available free.

For more information, please visit http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/ or http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/