Old Newspaper Reports

[237SJ]

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Has anyone subscribed to this? I signed up and I have 3 free searches.

[wolf63]

I'm off to ed now but I will look at it when Frankie wakes me in the morning with his starving cat routine.

[jno]

yes. They can be useful, particularly for births, deaths and marriages, but they can also be kind of random. In the 19th century lots of village stuff gets into the papers; in the 20th, very little does. My peasant ancestors in Britain are seldom mentioned, but a bookseller one frequently does.

Plus the actual selection of papers is variable, though it's growing all the time. Check and see how many papers are actually included in the times and places you want.

The other problem is that their optical readers are very unreliable, especially but not only with older papers where the ink has run a bit. So your grandmama could be mentioned lots of times but if her name has been mistranscribed you won't come across any of them. So try to search in as many different ways as you can - first name, surname, name of town, name of street, anything you know for sure.

And sign up for the emails. Two or three times a year they offer a month's subscription for £1. (If you sign up for that, make sure you go into My Account and untick the auto-renew option.)

[jno]

PS all searches are free even for non-subscribers. But you don't get to look at the results in full if you don't have some sort of subscription.

The archive is also included in Find My Past subscriptions.

[237SJ]

I found the local newspaper`s report of my great grandfather`s funeral. It gave all the details from who carried the coffin to who played the organ at the funeral service. That was in 1934. All I need to know is why my family has a Cornish tin mine engine house named after them

[jno]

I don't know if these people could help

http://www.cornish-mining.org.uk/

There could well be something in local papers. Do you know if the name was original or applied later?

[237SJ]

Thanks jno but I have been in touch with them and they couldn`t help me

[jno]

are there any local history societies in the areas where the mine was? Or local libraries with a history section? I got quite a lot of useful info about my bookseller from a librarian in Devon - all by email, I didn't have to go there. (But there may be limits to the amount of work they can do for free before charging research fees.)

[237SJ]

The mine is in Cornwall. The mine manager has the same surname as me but I can`t believe that a mine would have been named after the manager. Nobody seems to know.

[Jackdaw33]

' I can`t believe that a mine would have been named after the manager. '

Why not? In NE England many coal mines were named after the owner.

[237SJ]

I`m not talking about the owner though