This chapter covers other sources of information including:

Newspapers

There are two main types of newspapers: national and local. Unless an event of national importance happened at your house (or a previous owner/occupier was involved), you’re more likely to find information in local newspapers rather than national ones. However, it’s still worth running a broad-brush search through The Times online www.galegroup.com/Times to see if an event or a person made national news. If you live in a small village it’s also worth running a search on the village name. If you find a mention in The Times it’s likely that your local newspaper will have a more detailed report somewhere in the period between the week prior to The Times’ report and the week after.

Working With Local Newspapers

The oldest provincial newspapers date from the early eighteenth century. They tend to be a single folded sheet with two columns per page, produced every Saturday, sometimes twice a week, on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Gradually, as print became cheaper and stamp duty on newspapers was repealed, newspapers grew larger (with around seven columns per page), contained more pages and were published much more frequently.

The earliest local newspapers contain a mixture of local news and advertisements, plus national and international news reprinted from London papers.

Advertisements can be a rich source of information, particularly if your house was owned by a tradesman or was a former shop or pub – but it does mean spending a lot of time combing through the archives, unless your particular local newspapers have been indexed by academics or library staff and the advertisements are included in the index.

Antiquarians occasionally produce ‘annals’ – a kind of digest of newspapers, which can help you to pinpoint the date of an event and then look up more detailed information in the newspaper itself. For example, in Norwich Charles Mackie produced two volumes of annals, based on the reports of the Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette.

The index to the annals lists people who died and also events such as fires, floods, accidents, elections, murders, escapes from prison and the like. However, the annals usually have a bias towards the compiler’s interests (in the case of Mackie, election and political coverage is particularly detailed) so even if you don’t find something in a set of annals, there may still be a reference in the newspapers.

Where To Find Local Newspapers

Previous copies of local newspapers tend to be available on microfilm nowadays to preserve the originals. They are usually found at the main local studies library in your county, but your local records office may also have copies.

Other sources of local newspapers include these.

• Online at the British Library website, though availability is limited.
• In the British Library’s Newspaper Library at Colindale.
• On local library computer terminals; usually these are abstracts or full articles of more recent issues, held in intranet archives and for copyright reasons they may be available only in the main county library. These archives are often searchable if the reports are digitised, but be aware that the articles are highly likely to be within copyright.
• Online – for example the Newspaper Detectives have various nineteenth-century editions of the Surrey Advertiser at www.newspaper detectives.co.uk/index.htm. There may also be transcriptions from local newspapers online as part of a local history group’s website or through Genuki www.genuki.org.uk.

What To Expect From Local Newspapers

Local newspapers are particularly useful sources for:

• obituaries;
• notices of weddings;
• births and deaths;
• notable events – fires, epidemics, accidents, railways;
• criminal trials (usually reported verbatim) – general sessions and assizes, executions were usually covered as well;
• lists of people killed in wars or awarded medals;
• notices of bankruptcies;
• advertisements for local activities (e.g. events, clubs, societies) and local trades;
• sales of farms, businesses or property;
• information about licensing, e.g. if a pub received or was refused a licence – and why;
• enclosure (or ‘inclosure’) notices;
• information about collection of tax assessments;
• information about public buildings e.g. laying of the first stone, opening.