The archive contains some amazing stories about the sinking of the Titanic. In particular, ‘The Western Times’ of Tuesday 23 April 1912, contains dozens of fascinating and amazing stories about the final hours of the ill-fated ship. The likely reason why these reports are so powerful is because they are stories told by people who [...]

We’ve posted more free stories in the Timeline (in the 20th Centuy area) on the BNA homepage, as listed below: – A Report on the Sinking of the Titanic – Alexander Fleming Gives the Queen a Penicillin Sample for the Princesses – A Census Enumerator in 1901 Receives a Cold Welcome We plan to post [...]

We’ve recently created the following story galleries on our Facebook page: – Mothering Sunday Stories from 1873 and 1892 – Albert Einstein Argues with a Conductor on a Berlin Tram… – The Shooting of the Editor of ‘Le Figaro’ Newspaper by Madame Caillaux – The Discovery of Pluto – ‘The Ides of March’: Julius and [...]

As we have quite a number of website visitors abd Facebook followers from Australia, we thought it’d be worth mentioning the Australasian Congress on Genealogy and Heraldry that’s taking place in Adelaide from 28 to 31 March 2012. There is an impressive line-up of international family history experts attending the Congress, so it promises to [...]

Ed King, who is the Head of Newspaper Collections at the British Library, has published a podcast about the British Newspapers Archive (BNA). In this podcast, Ed talks about how helpful the BNA is to family historians, and also describes his work on the digitisation of historical newspapers. http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/digitised-newspapers-as-sources-for-family-history/  

Today marks the first equinox of 2012. Spring is finally here! While searching The Archive for content for our latest newsletter we discovered this quirky advert. It’s just one of  thousands that feature in The British Newspaper Archive. The advert tricks the March Hare, Alice and the Mad Hatter to sell the gutsy famous Irish dry stout [...]

TIP: Searching for a name? If you are looking for a specific forename/surname combination, a company name or any other multiple ordered word searches we suggest using Phrase search in the advanced form. This will bring you the most relevant results (well, the most specific!). Why? This is because the search engine looks for the word coordinates which [...]

We’ve received a fair few requests from many of you who would like to read the newspaper hand-out that we gave away at ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Live’. To download a copy of this Victorian-style newspaper, (PDF, 3MB), click on the link below: http://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/newsletter/images/wdytya-handout-2012.pdf