British & Irish Newspapers

Records of births, marriages and deaths provide a fantastic starting point for identifying our ancestors' names and where they lived, but in terms of trying to understand how those ancestors once lived there is no better resource to plunder than a good newspaper. Over the last two centuries in particular newspapers have recorded the events that have shaped our forebears' lives, and in many cases noted anecdotes, notices and advertisements directly concerning them and their local communities.

In this Unlock the Past guide, family historian Chris Paton reviews the availability of newspapers from across the British Isles, describing how to find those that have been digitised and made available online, and explaining how to locate considerably more that have not within the various libraries and archives across Britain and Ireland.