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Census Lookups General Lookups => Census and Resource Discussion => Topic started by: dhmm on Friday 04 January 19 04:15 GMT (UK)
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I've been researching my family history for a couple of years and now have a solid understanding of who's in my tree and their birth, marriage and death dates, where they lived, and their occupations, built up from a mix of Ancestry.com records, a good collection of handed-down photos, quite a few birth/death/marriage certificates, and a limited amount of rooting around graveyards and church records.
What I feel I am missing is much knowledge of their lives beyond that, such as any specific episodes or things they did.
Therefore I am thinking of subscribing to one of those online newspaper archives and trawling through those to see if any of them get a mention, but I'm skeptical that most people ever do anything to get a mention in a newspaper. I'd be interested to hear if people have found looking through newspaper archives for such individual stories of much help. Or are they more useful for just getting a general feel for what life was like in a specific town/county at a specific date?
Suggestions on good strategies would be much appreciated. I just suspect that it's the sort of thing that could consume a lot of time for little reward unless you have a disciplined way of going about it and know what to look for!
Thanks!
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someone asked this question the other day and got some good replies.
Link to that thread
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=805597.msg6643169#msg6643169
be warned, it leads you in directions you never thought possible!
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Try some of the free online newspapers first. And try Google book search, too. Even very ordinary people make into the newspapers and into books.
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Not meaning to hijack the thread but does anyone know of any British Newspaper Archive offers at the moment? I had a deal with it last year for 3 months and found it very interesting. With other subscriptions i can't really afford to pay full price at the moment.
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Not meaning to hijack the thread but does anyone know of any British Newspaper Archive offers at the moment? I had a deal with it last year for 3 months and found it very interesting. With other subscriptions i can't really afford to pay full price at the moment.
Can you access one through public library membership?
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I access Gale Newspaper Vault and The Times at home via my local County library website and my library card. :)