Newspapers

Newspapers are an invaluable resource for researching your house occupiers and sometimes the house itself. Each newspaper contains reports, advertisements and notices that can help you discover stories about your residents.
Where can I find old newspapers? ​Archives and libraries will have collections of national and local newspapers on a variety of media – usually microfilm. The problem may be in finding the relevant article, but occasionally you may be lucky and find a newspaper has been indexed by local historians or transcribed by a subscription  site. ​Some paid for sites have indexed newspapers such as findmypast.  

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What you will find in newspapers

• Birth, Marriage & Death Notices. These appear regularly after about 1820.
• Civil & Army Promotions. If your occupier was in the Civil Service or Military Services, their promotions and movements may be followed in newspapers.
• Advertisements. Early advertisements were less pictorial and relied on text and as a result can provide more information about your resident’s business dealings.
• Debtors. Names and addresses of debtors were often printed in newspapers.
• Court Reports. A feature of newspapers, particularly local ones, is the reporting of court proceedings. You can find the names of victims, defendants, witnesses and officials who were involved. 
• Charitable donations & subscription lists. Often newspapers printed long lists of names of people making charitable donations.
• Public Meetings. The Minutes of public meetings are reported in newspapers and may contain the name of the committee members.
• Personal notices. These can be requests for information on residents, lost pets or property 
• Photographs. Pic    tures in newspapers started appearing regularly in the 1920s. 

If you can find it  a useful aid to searching your  House History  is the  advertisements that were placed in newspapers when the property was being sold or advertised to let.                                                  

Where to find newspapers 
Apart from your local library or archives these may be of use.

​Great article by British Newspaper Archive  

British Newspaper Archive  You can search for articles and adverts by using keywords, name, location & date. 

​Find My Past has some newspapers

​Ancestry Newspapers and Publications

Welsh newspapers online is a great resource and searchable by categories such as family notices, advertisements, and news

In the days before newspapers we're common the news was shared by postings or broadsides placed on walls. The National Library of Scotland has a collection of these documents in The Word of the Street 
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Local Archives and Libraries 
You should check with your local archive or library to see wether  they have indexes to their newspaper collection or collections of news cuttings.
 
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Chronicling America to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. 
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Historic Newspapers  if you want to buy one as a gift 

Trove​ is useful if your search takes you to Australia 

Papers past if your destination is New Zealand