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Hot Off The Press – New Titles This Week

This week at The Archive has been another incredibly busy one as we have added 106,443 brand new pages to our collection, with one brand new newspaper from Lancashire, the Fleetwood Weekly News, joining us. Meanwhile, from Londonderry to Lanarkshire, from Maidstone to the Mearns, from West Sussex to Worcestershire, we’ve updated twelve of our existing titles from across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. So read on to discover more about our new title of the week, which serves the

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Your Guide To Obituaries On The Archive

Our newspaper Archive contains many thousands of obituaries and death notices, which can help you unlock fascinating information and stories about your family history. In this special blog, we present your guide to obituaries on The Archive: how to search them, where to find them, and how to make the most of them for your family history research. But first, what is an obituary? Register now and explore the Archive What Is An Obituary? An obituary, according to the Cambridge

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Hamlet Histories and Village Tales – Uncovering Rural Local History on The Archive

So far this November we’ve been celebrating all things local history, and earlier this month we brought you a guide on how to discover more about the history of your street. But now we turn from urban to rural, as we take a look at how to uncover the history of those places where there might only be one street, the hamlets and the villages of the United Kingdom. This blog, therefore, will show you how to uncover local history

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Guest Post: Researching Infanticide in Victorian Salford by Martin Baggoley

As part of our history of law and crime month on The Archive, we are delighted to featured a very special guest post by author and former probation officer Martin Baggoley, who has written extensively on the history of crime and punishment. In this guest post, Martin describes how he used The Archive to research the tragic topic of infanticide in Victorian Salford, a desperately sad chapter in Britain’s crime history. So read on to discover the methods that Martin

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An Essential Guide to Historical London Newspapers

London is steeped in rich history. Every borough, street and building in the UK’s capital city has a past and the British Newspaper Archive is one of the best resources available for unlocking the stories behind them. No matter what part of London you’re interested in researching, you’ll find newspapers covering every locality, with contemporary reports from some of the most pivotal eras in British history. Register now and view London newspapers for FREE One of the quickest ways to focus only on our

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We hit another exciting milestone! A newspaper from every county in England.

We have reached a major new milestone in our project to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library’s vast collection of historic British & Irish newspapers.  Following the addition of a newspaper from the country’s smallest county, Rutland, the Archive now covers every corner of England as, for the first time, at least one title from each of the country’s 48 counties is now available to search and explore.  We have added 3,968 pages from the Rutland

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Diving into Danny Dyer’s Past – Learning more from newspapers

In last night’s episode, we learned that Danny Dyer is a direct descendant of King Edward III, his 15 times great-grandfather. Many of us lack such famous ancestors, but that doesn’t make ours – and the times they lived in – any less interesting. Let’s take a look at Danny Dyer’s working-class ancestors – some strong male figures that Danny was hoping to find – and learn how the British Newspaper Archive can help you flesh out the lives of

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National newspapers, local newspapers and cases of breach of promise

Denise Bates, historian and author of Breach of Promise to Marry: A History of How Jilted Brides Settled Scores, explains why local newspapers are often more useful for historical research than national newspapers.   **************   Breach of promise was a legal claim. It allowed a man or woman to demand financial compensation from their ex-fiancée or ex-fiancé if they broke their engagement to marry.  Newspapers are the best source of information about breach of promise cases, but there is

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