Old newspapers can be a rich source of information when genealogy research, family history information, and general historical research are required.
Newspapers can give a real feel to the spirit of an era and the lifestyle of people of a certain time.
Consider the example of English newspapers.
The first well-known English printed newsletter was published in 1549. The first copy of the oldest newspaper to date, the Berrow’s Worcester Journal, dates from 1690, and has been regularly published since 1709.
Other English newspapers that have survived to this day are the Aberdeen Journal since 1748, the Times since 1788 (first called the Daily Universal Register) and the Daily Telegraph.
Newspapers can be widely used for genealogical archival searches and historical research for all kinds of useful information. This is information such as, for example, birth, marriage, and death records. But also in the archives of newspapers there may be information about a person who died without leaving a will, which can help in matters of inheritance. Newspapers often provide the necessary information about the genealogy of a person, which helps to find his relatives.
Where are the archives of English-language newspapers stored to search for relatives and conduct family history research
Firstly, it is the British Press Archive with 40 million newspaper pages from the collection of the British Library, digitized over the past ten years. Searching the site for free, and viewing the pages of newspapers for money.
Another useful source for genealogy searches is the Internet library of archived magazines with magazines from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Old American publications can be found in the Chronicles of America, where there are newspapers dating from the late 17th century.
Often in archival newspapers on the Internet, relatives are searched for by name, place of publication, or date range; for example, if you know that your great-grandfather died in the First World War, and you know the date of his death, then you could search by the place of publication and the date range of 2 weeks at the time of his death.
The National Archive contains a selection of newspapers from former British colonies, which can be useful if your ancestors emigrated, for example, to Canada.
The most complete archive of English newspapers is in the British Library in London.
From the article by D. Curran “Newspapers for Historical Search”
Good luck in finding.