Findmypast trials pioneering search function for newspapers

Family history site findmypast.co.uk has begun a trial of a more powerful search function making it easier to find relatives’ names in old newspapers.

The function is available for the website’s collection of editions of the Essex Newsman, which date from 31 October 1881 to 6 November 1943 and contain 1.2 million names.

Findmypast users will receive automatic hints calling attention to names in Newsman articles matching those in their tree, thanks to a new way of extracting first and last names from printed text with optical character recognition (OCR).

The site plans to expand the technology to its full newspaper collection, and to use it to extract other details such as locations, events and relationships.