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It’s not just archives that are putting their holdings online. Online newspaper archives are increasingly useful for family historians, helping you to locate articles about your ancestors that may otherwise have never been found. It is always worth checking the local newspaper that covered the area your family lived in if you have a date of birth, marriage or death for a prominent ancestor that may have warranted a mention in the personal announcements or obituaries section. In the majority of cases you will still be required to visit the local library or county record office or go to the British Newspaper Library in north London to scroll through the original chronological records.

The most important records are the digitized collections of national newspapers, many of which can be searched by keyword, article type and date range. The Times is one of the most prominent of these; its collections are available online from 1785 to the present day. To access the entire collection of The Times an InfoTrac database connection is needed, to which most major archives and local library networks provide free access. Your local library may be able to give you a PIN number and instructions about how to use the database for free from home. The Scotsman also has an online database of its backdated editions from 1817 to 1950, accessed at http://archive.scotsman.com, and the historic archive of the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes can be searched and viewed for free at www.gazettes-online.co.uk.

Local newspapers tend to be more fruitful when searching for newspaper articles for the majority of our ancestors, but you may be surprised to locate an entry in a national newspaper in the form of criminal reports, court summaries, advertisements, changes of name and address notices, in addition to the many birth, marriage, death and funeral announcements and obituaries they contain. These ever-growing online newspaper archives are so useful to modern genealogists purely because they enable us to find articles about our ancestors by name rather than by searching through months’ or even years’ worth of original newspaper reports.