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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,…

This past week we released 105,098 pages to The Archive.  In time for International Women’s Day we are thrilled to add nine new titles to our Suffragette Collection.  We have also  updated four existing titles including The Globe for which we now have editions spanning 1804 to 1921, and our recently added Scottish title The North Star and Farmer’s Chronicle for which we now have a run from 1893 to 1911.Our new titles represent the full spectrum of the feminist and suffrage movements, from…

Alice Maud Mary Arncliffe-Sennett was an energetic militant suffragette, determined to fight for women’s suffrage even if that meant getting arrested and going against prominent leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Milicent Fawcett.  Through the newspapers, we can find details about Arncliffe-Sennett’s life, career, and activism.Alice, or Maud as she was often called, lived in London and worked as an actress.  Her stage name was Mary Kingsley.  Here is a review by The Era of her performance as Lady…

This year, in recognition of the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, we will showcase the lives and activities of women involved in the Suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Despite making headlines for their activities many of these women are now forgotten.In this blog post we will revive the memory of Irish Suffragette, Anna Garvey Kelly, whose support of the cause of Suffrage saw her spend a month in Holloway prison in…

Annie Kenney gained attention in her work for the suffrage movement in 1905 following her arrest for assault and obstruction during a rally in Manchester. Kenney would become one of the leading figures in the Woman’s Social and Political Union and face imprisonment multiple times during her activist career fighting for the right to vote.Click on an image below to enlarge then use the arrows to move image by image throughout the collection. In the image viewer, you can also…

One name that you will doubtless encounter if you’ve spent any time researching the suffrage movement in England is Pankhurst. Emmeline and her daughters were actively engaged in the work, with Emmeline and, later, her eldest daughter, Christabel, leading the Women’s Social and Political Union.Click on the next arrow to scroll through eleven images featuring one of the most famous suffragettes in history.[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”44″ gal_title=”Emmeline Pankhurst”]Subscribe today and discover more stories on the suffrage movement…

This year, 2018, is the 100 year anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918.  The Act which gave propertied women over the age of thirty, and all men over the age of twenty-one, the right to vote.  Over the course of 2018 we aim to digitise several suffragette and women’s newspapers.  These papers will allow us to explore the suffrage movement, and the social sphere of the women who campaigned for the right to vote.We are delighted to be able to…

One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…

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…