Search the blog

Here at The Archive, we love to learn of the discoveries you have made through our newspaper pages, and how you have used them, whether they have influenced novels, or provided information for dissertations. We were incredibly grateful, therefore, when crime writer and athletics historian Peter Lovesey contacted us with his account of sixty years of researching newspapers. From accessing historical newspapers in their original form, to scrolling through microfilm reels, and finally to searching newspapers digitally on the British…

Using newspapers for your Scottish genealogy researchDo you find yourself daunted at the prospect of researching your Scottish ancestors? Keep the heid! There exists a fantastic array of records that can get you further along in your family history research. The main problem, however, is access. Much of what exists has not been ditigised, and for those that have been, many are not indexed. It is overwhelming figuring out where to search and what records, if they were created,…

With Halloween approaching, we wanted to see what we could find related to the topic of hauntings in The British Newspaper Archive.Of children and hauntingsOften the origins of a haunting myth are rooted in death and loss. Sometimes the myth grows and morphs to such a point where its origin is indeterminate. Other times, the sad truth of its origin is unexpectedly revealed, as with the ‘grim discovery’ at a ‘haunted house’ in 1921, reported in The Scotsman.This…

Whilst Mothering Sunday is now commonly combined and celebrated with the secular holiday of Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom and Ireland, its origin is religious in nature and separate from that of the American Mother’s Day.Starting in the 1700s, individuals would attend a special service on Laetare Sunday (the fourth Sunday of Lent) at their mother church (usually the church where an individual was baptised or their local parish church/closest cathedral). This activity was soon coined as going…

‘The awful catastrophe which occurred at the Tay Bridge on the last Sunday of the year is still the all-absorbing theme of conversation in the community…’A section of the Tay Bridge, which connects Dundee and Wormit in Fife, collapsed during a terrible storm on the night of 28 December 1879.  Tragically, a Dundee-bound train plunged into the freezing waters of the river, with the loss of 60 lives (although some estimate the loss to have been 75 lives).Graphic illustrated the scenes of…

Recently, several people have asked us when the newspaper library at Colindale will be closing and the print newspapers moving to Boston Spa. In June, the British Library confirmed that the Colindale site in North London will close on Friday 8 November 2013.As many of you will already know, the content on the BNA website comes from the British Library’s amazing newspaper collection at Colindale – which contains over 750 million pages from local, regional and national newspapers, as well as periodicals. But…

‘Errand boy who became a millionaire’Sir Thomas Johnstone Lipton, the Glasgow-born self-made man who worked himself up from errand boy to become a millionaire, died in London on 2 October 1931 – he was 81.Below is a newspaper report (published the day after his death) that offers an overview of Lipton’s amazing life and achievements.This image of Sir Lipton, shows him in the uniform of the City Lieutenancy.Discover more about Sir Lipton…