Overseas Newspapers

If your relatives changed countries to start a new life, try using newspapers to trace their movements

If you have ancestors in far-flung corners of the globe, you’ll be happy to hear that there is a wealth of online archives for newspapers and other periodicals from around the world. Ancestry and Findmypast include overseas publications in their collections, while Wikipedia has a comprehensive guide to tracking down online archives worldwide at bit.ly/onlinenewspaper archives. Remember too that newspapers published in coastal cities with ports may contain lists of new arrivals, a valuable substitute for passenger lists. Some archives are free to access, while others require a subscription, and it’s amazing what you can find. In the 1 January 1923 issue of the New Zealand Evening Post on the Papers Past website, I discovered that my great great uncle Charles Madell survived a deadly accident while riding in a motorcycle sidecar.

EUROPEANA w

europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/ newspapers

This newish website is funded by the

European Commission and contains more than 400 years of history in over four million newspapers across Europe.

PAPERS PAST

w paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers The National Library of New Zealand holds a collection of freeto-access digitised newspapers from the

19th and 20th centuries, including titles published for a Maori – audience.

JAMAICA GLEANER

w gleaner.newspaperarchive.com Based in Kingston, the Gleaner has been publishing continuously since 1834 and its archive hosts almost a million pages of historical newspapers searchable by keyword and date.

TROVE

w trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper

Trove is a veritable

Aladdin’s cave of

Australian resources containing content from museums, libraries and repositories, together with millions of digitised newspapers – all for free.