Articles by Rose Staveley-Wadham

In late 1937 in the borough of Croydon, South London, people began to fall ill with typhoid. Typhoid is a disease that is associated with contaminated water and outbreaks of the illness, at least in the United Kingdom, is something that we might associate today with the nineteenth century, before an age of improved sanitation and safe supplies of drinking water.And so, in this special blog, we will take a look at how the Croydon typhoid epidemic gradually unfolded, as

In early May 1933 reports that some kind of monster had been spotted in Loch Ness, in the Scottish Highlands, near Inverness, reached the press. By the end of the year, national weekly publication The Sphere wrote:When the Loch Ness monster first came into the news many believed that the stories published in the Press were nothing more than mere sensationalism. To-day this theory does not hold good. People, whose judgement can be relied on, have seen the ‘monster,’ and

As we move now into February we have been extremely busy here at The Archive, adding 139,438 brand new pages to our collection, with the addition of two brand new titles over the past seven days. Meanwhile, we have made significant updates to a range of our existing titles, with 26 titles updated in all.So read on to discover more about our two new titles of the week, one of which represented the interests of the various Nonconformist Protestant groups of

This week at The Archive has been an extremely busy one as ever – we have added 199,897 brand new pages as we continue to augment our collection of newspapers from across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Over the past seven days alone we have added seven brand new titles, from Finchley to Liverpool, from Glasgow to Skegness, whilst we have updated nineteen of our existing titles, with significant additions to some of our Nottinghamshire titles.So read on to discover more

This week at The Archive we have added 122,558 new pages, from Norfolk to Northern Ireland, from Hull to Hammersmith. We have updated 24 of our existing titles in total, incorporating updates to some of our specialist transport and temperance titles. Meanwhile our updates this week span over 160 years of headlines, our earliest update being the year 1836 to the Town and Country Advertiser, and our latest being the year 1999 to the Lynn Advertiser.This week sees plenty of additions to our later

Just after the turn of the nineteenth century in 1901 1.5 million people across the United Kingdom worked as domestic servants. That’s 4% of the population engaged in domestic service, as butlers, footmen, valets, housemaids, cooks, scullery maids and the like.And so, as part of our investigation of the history of employment this month, in this special blog we are going to take a look at what it was like for those who worked in domestic service in the late nineteenth and

This week at The Archive we are celebrating another milestone, as we have now reached over 47 million pages in our collection, with the addition of 194,166 brand new pages over the last week alone. Meanwhile, joining us this week are five brand new newspapers, which comprise of two Irish titles (including a special ‘entertainment journal’), a local Somerset newspaper, a title dedicated to the factory industry in Yorkshire, and an ‘agricultural, commercial and family gazette.’We have also updated 72 of our

With the release of the 1921 Census of England and Wales on our sister site Findmypast last week, we were delighted to discover a range of unusual occupations returned within its pages, from knocker-ups to lamplighters, from rag and bone men to rat catchers.And so, using our newspapers, we thought we’d shine a light on some of the past’s most unusual or indeed lost occupations, and try to understand what it was like to actually be a crossing sweeper, or

As we return from our Christmas break, we would like to wish all of our subscribers and readers a very happy New Year, and to assure them we have not been idle. Indeed, over the past week we have added 67,202 brand new pages to the collection, with the addition of three brand new titles from the north and the south of England.So read on to discover, in this our first blog of the new year, about our three new

On 2 April 1748 the Ipswich Journal reported on ‘the most terrible‘ fire which had broken out at a Mr. Elridge’s, a peruke maker, in Exchange Alley, London. Rumours soon spread that a boy had left a candle near some wig boxes, which had been set on fire, and then:The Flames [had] extended themselves into Cornhill, and burnt down the Houses of Mr. Walthoe, Mr. Strahan, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Brotherton, and Mr. Astley, Booksellers; Toca’s and the Rainbow Coffee-Houses, the Fleece