Grow Your Family Tree
Find ancestors in old newspapers
Looking for a famous (or infamous) relative who made the headlines? Nick Peers reveals how to…
Do you have a local celebrity lurking in your family tree? Or someone famous for less honourable reasons? Perhaps they were a semiprofessional sports star, or you’ve heard stories about them landing in trouble with the law.
To track down potential stories about their exploits you need to explore the ever-growing archive of local newspapers that are making their way online.
By far the most comprehensive collection can be found at the British Newspaper Archive ( www. britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), which stretches back to the 1700s and covers thousands of local papers (it has so far digitised over 35 million pages!).
Sadly, this resource isn’t free, but if you prioritise your time you should be able to pay £12.95 for a single month’s unlimited access to do all the research you need.
Search the archive using specific terms
Obviously, a simple name search is likely to throw up thousands of possible (and wrong) matches, so knowing where (and when) to focus your search is key.
Once signed up, click the Advanced Search button. You’ll see there are fields for AND (‘Search all words’), OR (‘Search some words’) and exact-phrase searches. There’s also a handy ‘Exclude words’ field for omitting results containing specific words (useful for filtering out famous namesakes of your ancestor). Just fill these in and click Search to see what comes up.
Each search result provides a headline, a short extract with search terms highlighted, and the newspaper edition. Click a result to open that page in the newspaper viewer. Next, click and drag to move around the page and use your mouse wheel or the controls in the top-left to zoom in and out, with your search terms highlighted in blue (‘Ken Hirons’ in the screenshot left).
If you find a match, you can print the page, or download it as a PDF to your computer. You’ll be able to keep this after your subscription expires.
Use date filters
If no results are returned, try broadening your search terms – include variations of your ancestor’s name (such as Edward, Ed and Ted) in the ‘Search some words’ field, or drop some of the more precise terms. You may get lucky and find your search terms produce a string of relevant results, but it’s more likely you’ll find pages of potential matches to investigate.
This is where the filters on the lefthand side of the screen (see screenshot above) come into play. The date filter lets you narrow them by ever-decreasing periods of time: first in 50-year blocks, then by decade, year, month and day.
You can search by newspaper title too, but we recommend first using the Region or Counties filter to narrow your search. Both filters and search terms can be saved as the basis of future searches – use the ‘Saved’ link at the top to return to them.
Be prepared for disappointments. My great-grandfather Edward Caldicott was flyweight boxing champion of Birmingham in 1900, but his success failed to make the papers. On the other hand, my great-uncle Ken Hirons was a renowned amateur actor and youth leader, and featured in Buckinghamshire papers as well as the Dailymirror.