Quite a bit of the information I’ve collected about my relatives – and a lot of the more interesting facts – has come from old newspapers. There was a time when you would have to go and sit in some building in north London and wait for them to be brought to you on microfilm, before endlessly reeling (sometimes literally) through miles of film to find something relevant to your research.
How much easier things are now that the internet is filling out a bit. There are several very easy-to-use, searchable resources for looking up old newspaper archives, where a keyword search can take you to the appropriate story in seconds, rather than hours as in the olden days.
For me, the National Library of Australia’s resource at http://newspapers.nla.gov.au has proved invaluable in tracking down information about my Australian relatives: I could fill a small book with details of my great grandfather Archibald‘s comings and goings on the coasting passenger boats that plied between (more…)