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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: thebounder on Thursday 09 December 21 08:16 GMT (UK)
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I'm having problems with accessing articles in the Weekly Dispatch and Reynolds News newspapers. An example: search for "Cropper" in the Weekly Dispatch for 7th December 1930. You should only get one link. Clicking on that link takes you to Page 1 of 2 Pages, neither of which contain the article in question. This happens on many editions of these newspapers. I understand that not all pages in a newspaper may be available, or may not be suitable for display, but why give links to non-existent pages ? I have written to Find My Past, but have yet to get any reply from them.
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So sorry - posted on the wrong thread
Kay
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Apologies re my previous post - I have had the same problem on other press searches only this morning
Kay
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Ive jut put in all the filters that you've listed and only 2 refs came up.
Was this what you were wanting:
https://search.findmypast.co.uk/bna/viewarticle?id=bl%2f0003359%2f19301207%2f021&stringtohighlight=cropper
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I have found a problem with early Kent newspapers. As far as I have checked, it only seems to affect the 1740s and 50s, which is not a time I have used much in the past. Some or all of the icons are blacked out, and if I click on them it says there is an unexpected problem.
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Ive jut put in all the filters that you've listed and only 2 refs came up.
Was this what you were wanting:
https://search.findmypast.co.uk/bna/viewarticle?id=bl%2f0003359%2f19301207%2f021&stringtohighlight=cropper
That is the same page that I get, but there is no mention of the required article on this page.
I do have an update to report. After posting on this forum, I tried contacting Find My Past again, and this time I got a reply which states:
Good Morning
Thank you for your email
I have checked and can see a problem with this record
I have raised this with our technical teams and will let you know once we have an update!
Kind Regards
I'll report if I get any progress.
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The workaround I use is find other links for the newspaper edition, as often other result links have the full list of pages and from there you can browse through the pages and locate the article you want.
So in this example:
1) search by "cropper"
2) drill down the date to 07 Dec 1930
3) filter newspapers to the "Weekly Dispatch (London)"
4) remove the "cropper" search expression
5) click the search button again
This results in 571 "articles", so keep trying one until it shows the full pages (in this case 24 pages).
Most of these old newspaper don't have many pages so browsing through them isn't so bad but if you want to know exactly how many pages an edition has you can use BNA directly. I don't think FindMyPast has the capability to browse pages directly by newspaper edition.
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1930-12-07/1930-12-07?NewspaperTitle=Weekly%2BDispatch%2B(London)&IssueId=BL%2F0003359%2F19301207%2F&County=London%2C%20England
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Forgot to add, for this example, you want page 21.
https://search.findmypast.co.uk/bna/ViewArticle?id=BL%2F0003359%2F19301207%2F539%2F0021&browse=true
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Ah - you turned the pages :)
Add - I did a search on al lthe criteria, as listed in my earlier reply, and was directed to Page 1 of the correct edition.
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Thank you cuffie81. I tried your method and it works perfectly, but by adapting that method slightly produces a better result.
By still searching for "Cropper", but adding the filter to only search for the Weekly Dispatch for that date, displays the correct link that takes you directly to the article.
It's not ideal, but it seems to work, thanks for putting me on the right track.
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That's odd, it didn't work for me before. I wonder if they've just changed something (seems unlikely, FindMyPast are rarely that quick to fix anything).
Trying again, just searching by "Cropper" and drilling down by date the result link is now correct. Odd.
https://search.findmypast.co.uk/search/british-newspapers?date=1930-12-07&date_offsetdate=1930-12-07&modifiedfacets=true&exactnames=true&exactkeywords=false&keywords=cropper
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My original post now seems to work perfectly, so maybe Find My Past has updated something. I might add that this is not something that I found for the first time today, it has been bothering me for months, so it's not just a temporary mistake.
However it only seems to be fixed for the Weekly Dispatch. If you try searching for "Slate-Club" on Reynold's Newspaper for 14th December 1930, the link shown doesn't work, but by using the method provided by cuffie81, the article can be found on Page 8, even though they say there are only 3 pages. How can you have a newspaper with 3 pages anyway.