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New Digitized Historical Newspapers You’ll Want To Read
New digitized historical newspapers now online for Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Tennessee. Also the British Military Register, UK Suffragette Newspaper Collection, and papers for Nottingham, South London, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Leicestershire and North Yorkshire, England. We report two success stories from using these weekly Friday reports—what successes could YOU have?
I love this email that Lisa Louise Cooke received recently: “Hi Lisa, I just want to thank you for your weekly updates of new record sources. A couple of weeks ago you sent a link for the Illinois State University newspaper archive. Being my dad’s alma mater, I searched for him. A handful of stories came up about when my dad was almost kicked out of school and how his fellow students came to his rescue by staging a sit-in to prevent that. He’d had some minor infraction with a housing rule. I had forgotten that my dad had told me about it. I only wish he was still alive for me to share these articles with him. Thank you so much!” – Sara
We love hearing about your discoveries in our weekly Friday record posts! Below, we’re reporting more historical newspapers that might be just what you need to read. I’ve included two news articles I found about my own family, too.
New digitized historical newspapers: Free collections
Colorado. The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection is a fantastic (and free) collection of digitized newspapers that you shouldn’t miss if your family lived in The Centennial State. I know this because I have discovered absolute gems here about my Felix great-grandparents during the few years they lived in Hugo, Colorado. Here are two of my favorite articles. The first is a fascinating glimpse into how novel and exciting it was to make a long-distance call. The second is a moving sale notice: a harbinger of change for the family, which was about to leave behind its horse-breeding business and move to the city of Pueblo.
The site recently reported a new addition to the site: The Altrurian, covering Piñon, a town in the Tabequache Park in southwestern Colorado. According to the site, “This title is especially unique not only because it began publication even before the community it represented even existed, but also because it further adds to the narrative of communal or ‘Utopian’ societies that gained a relatively significant following in the late 19th century in Colorado.”
Georgia. The Digital Library of Georgia’s blog recently announced “the availability of the Red and Black in the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive….Since 1893, the Red and Black has provided a training ground for University of Georgia students interested in gaining experience in various aspects of newspaper publishing and to produce a high quality daily newspaper for the University of Georgia community.” The paper is published in Athens, GA, and is the state’s most widely-circulated college newspaper.
Now online at Newspapers.com
- SE Iowa and NW Illinois: the Quad-City Times, published in Davenport, with coverage beginning in 1855.
- Montana: The Billings Weekly Gazette, with nearly 27,000 digitized pages covering 1888-1929. Other new Billings collections: The Billings Daily Tribune, The Billings Evening Journal, and The Midland Review.
- Tennessee. For Memphis: The Germantown Star (1968-1973). For Germantown, the Germantown News, with nearly 60,000 pages (1974-2016) and The Shelby Sun Times (1994-2008).
- Southampton, Hampshire, England. The Hampshire Advertiser, a new collection of more than 30,000 pages covering 1830-1900.
- York, North Yorkshire, England. The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald. The collection has more than 93,000 digitized pages spanning 1801-1900.
Newspapers.com has also updated dozens of newspaper collections across the U.S. and for England, Canada, Australia, Scotland, Ireland and more. Click here to explore their newspaper holdings for your ancestral hometown.
New at The British Newspaper Archive
Here’s some news from The British Newspaper Archive (remember, this is the same source for newspapers you find on Genealogy Giant Findmypast.com–no separate subscription required). In recent weeks, they’ve added:
- Over 5000 pages of a new British military newspaper. The Military Register dates back to the late Georgian period and covers contemporary reports from the Napoleonic Wars, the East India Company and more.
- More than 30 years of coverage to the Nottingham Journal, a collection that now totals nearly 200,000 pages and spans a full century (1811-1912, some years missing) of everyday life “in the Queen of the Midlands.”
- More Cambridgeshire newspaper pages, which now number over 14,000 and date back to the 1700s. There are several titles for Cambridge, Huntington, March, and Wisbech.
- More than 13,000 pages of coverage for the county of Leicestershire, including over 30 more years for the Leicester Daily Post, which joins seven other papers published in Leicester. Coverage on that city dates back to 1813. (News for Leicestershire can also be found in the Rutland Echo and Leicestershire Advertiser.)
- Votes for Women. This paper joins the growing Suffragette Newspaper Collection. They now have 14 papers in the collection—we haven’t been able to report each one of them—and will continue to add to it this centenary year. Click here to read about suffragette newspaper and other records now online at the BNA’s sister site, Findmypast.com.
- More than a half-century of coverage to the Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, both South London titles. This paper’s online pages now number over 21,000 and span 1855-1912.
Here’s hoping these new digitized historical newspapers lead you to some family history gems, too! If the times and places we’ve covered today don’t include your family, don’t despair. Instead, click here to browse more of our Friday record posts. You’ll likely find something worth exploring. (Will you post a comment if you do? We’d love to hear!)
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!
About the Author: Sunny Morton
Sunny is a Contributing Editor at Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems; her voice is often heard on the Genealogy Gems Podcast and Premium Podcasts. She’s known for her expertise on the world’s biggest family history websites (she’s the author of Genealogy Giants: Comparing the 4 Major Websites); writing personal and family histories (she also wrote Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy); and sharing her favorite reads for the Genealogy Gems Book Club.
Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast Episode 158
In the new Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast episode 158, get an exclusive Chronicling America tutorial from the manager of this enormous, free historical newspaper website. Also: a loving daughter hears her father answer important questions 35 years after his death;, a fallen soldier’s remains are identified, a DNA question about Native American ancestry, and reading picks from the Genealogy Gems Book Club.
The newest episode of the Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast has a headline-worthy interview for everyone with U.S. roots! Newspaper research guru Lisa Louise Cooke goes deep into the free, fabulous Chronicling America historical newspaper website with Deborah Thomas, Library of Congress manager for the sponsoring National Digital Newspaper Program. Premium eLearning members will get the scoop on how the site came to be and who chooses what content gets digitized. Hear about a lesser-known tool on the site that can help you find copies of your ancestors’ local papers. Best of all, get tips from both Deborah and Lisa on how to search the site for newspaper stories that reveal your family history.
Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast 158: More newsworthy highlights
Here’s what else Genealogy Gems Premium eLearning members will find in this exclusive podcast episode:
- A family finally lays to rest their fallen U.S. soldier in Arlington National Cemetery–and solves the mystery of his fate after decades.
- A listener writes in to tell us about a precious discovery, 35 years after she lost her father: recordings of his voice, telling the stories she always wanted to hear from him.
- A fascinating DNA question about identifying Native American ancestry.
- Great reading suggestions for fans of the Genealogy Gems Book Club–a listener recommendation and two more titles inspired by the episode itself.
Genealogy Gems Premium eLearning opens doors
The new Genealogy Gems Premium eLearning (previously known as Premium Membership) opens doors to new ideas and inspiration for your family history research. Premium Podcast episodes such as this one are published every month–and Premium eLearning has the entire archive. New Premium Videos publish regularly, and now include a full DNA tutorial series (click here to see a list of all the videos). All Premium eLearning materials are packed with genealogy strategies, tips, how-tos and links you can use right away. Click here to learn more about Premium eLearning and how it can help you open doors to your own family stories.
These UK Suffragette Records Tell Amazing Stories
UK suffragette records tell amazing stories about the women and men who fought the British government for women’s voting rights a century ago. Nathan Dylan Goodwin, the popular Genealogy Gems Book Club author, shares three of his favorite sources for discovering suffragette stories like the one that unfolds in his new short story, “The Suffragette’s Secret.”
Thanks to Genealogy Gems Book Club author Nathan Dylan Goodwin for contributing this guest blog post.
My new short story, “The Suffragette’s Secret,” features a fictional main character, Grace Emmerson, a suffragette living on the South Coast of England in Brighton. But many of the events and supporting characters described in the story are real. In the story, forensic genealogist Morton Farrier uses real historical documents while working in the modern day to uncover Grace’s suffragette past. Many of these historical records (over 55,000 of them) are now available online in the FindmyPast Suffragette Collection.
Morton and I would recommend spending some time browsing this fascinating collection from a pivotal moment in women’s history. Even if your own ancestors did not make the headlines, they may have been involved at a more local level. And the lives of both women and men in your family may have been affected by suffragette activity, whether or not they are mentioned by name in the records. So it is a collection definitely worth exploring.
UK suffragette records I love
1. Suffragette Amnesty register (HO 45/24665)
With the threat of war and its having become inevitable in August 1914, most of the dominant suffragette organizations, including the Women’s Social and Political Union suspended all militant activity. In response, the British government gave an amnesty to more than one thousand women (and some men) who had been arrested for the cause. Their amnesty records are part of the Findmypast Suffragette Collection and also searchable at Ancestry.com (if your subscription includes UK records).
Alongside the names of those arrested comes the date and court where the charge was originally brought – an excellent starting point for further research.
In “The Suffragette’s Secret,” I referenced the real-life case of Nellie Godfrey. In the Amnesty Register of 1914, her name and references appear thus in the image shown here (the links lead to Google Maps references of the Bow Street magistrate’s court):
Godfrey, Nellie
Bow Street 9/7/09 180.782
Bolton 8/12/1909 186.626
Bow Street 27/11/11 203.651
Taking the second reference as an example of where this record can lead, this shows that Nellie appeared on the 8th December 1909 before Bolton Magistrate’s Court.
Searching for these criteria in Findmypast’s Suffragette Newspaper Collection brings up the following story: ‘Nellie Godfrey, of London, was charged at Bolton yesterday with throwing a missile at a motor car in which Mr [Winston] Churchill rode to his meeting on Tuesday night, and was fined 40s or seven days. Defendant went to prison. It was stated that the missile thrown was a piece of iron wrapped in a paper bearing the words “Thrown by a woman of England as a protest against the Government’s treatment of political prisoners.”’
For most of these records, further information exists at the National Archives. Prefixing the reference number with HO (for Home Office) and typing it into the document search box (HO 186626) on the National Archives website brings up a link to a document which details Nellie’s arrest and time in prison. (Unfortunately, these records are not yet digitized, but can be ordered.)
2. Calendar of Prisoners
These records, about suffragette prisoners who were tried in the London courts between 1911 and 1914, feature some of the prominent names from the movement, including the famous Pankhursts (one of whom is shown in the Calendar of Prisoners image below):
One record found in Crim 9/58 is that of Emily Wilding Davison, shown here. She was killed when she threw herself under the king’s horse at Epsom on 8th June 1913. Among several interesting details found in a document pertaining to an earlier arrest in December 1911 are to be found the following facts:
Emily Wilding Davison, 36, a tutor, arrested for ‘unlawfully and maliciously placing in a Post Office letter box a dangerous substance likely to injure the same and its contents and attempt to commit like offence.’ She was jailed at Holloway for six months.
This type of militancy, placing dye or some other kind of corrosive liquid into a letter box in order to render the letters inside illegible, was common among suffragettes and an act often making the local newspapers, which can be read about as part of the Suffragette Collection.
Further records for Emily Wilding Davison exist in the FindmyPast Suffragette Collection, including HO 144/1150/210696, which details several of her actions and subsequent convictions.
3. Suffragettes’ Complaints against Police (MEPO 3/203)
During my research for “The Suffragette’s Secret,” I visited the National Archives and accessed the Suffragette’s Complaints against Police, which was then not available online. At 286 pages, “Complaints against Police” provides an illuminating account of how the police handled a large group of suffragettes who had converged on Downing Street, intent on gaining access to the Prime Minister’s (Herbert Asquith) residence. A sample appears here, to the right.
The file includes several accounts from the perspective of the police involved, in which they all strenuously deny any harsh treatment of the women whom they encountered there. In contradiction to this are the numerous and varied statements from men and women involved in the altercation in which physical abuse and violence by the policemen was described as wide-spread, as this statement from the file attests:
‘About 2.15 in Parliament Square PC A.R.82 struck a Women’s Social & Political Union member in the face. At about 2.30 between Parliament Square and Cannon Row, almost opposite Palace Chambers, PC R.R.21 twisted the arm of and shook furiously a lady he had arrested. She was not resisting arrest. During the raid in Downing Street yesterday evening PC 449B got his knee into the middle of one woman’s back and knocked her down. PC 456E afterwards banged the same woman’s head repeatedly against the railings. I can produce my witness at any inquiry.’
This Suffragette Collection from FindmyPast contains a wealth of information useful to genealogists, social historians and those interested in women’s history. Other records available include cabinet papers, the treatment and force-feeding of political prisoners and various actions and imprisonments of the women men and men involved in the fight to gain the ability to vote.
Nathan Dylan Goodwin is one of our favorite Genealogy Gems Book Club authors! He’s a must-read for anyone who loves a good mystery–especially when the solving is led by a skilled (and very likable) forensic genealogist. Nathan first joined the Genealogy Gems Podcast to talk about his book The Lost Ancestor, but he now has several Morton Farrier, Forensic Genealogist books out. The newest one is a 2-for-1 bonus: “The Suffragette’s Secret,” the short story, is published with his new full-length book, The Wicked Trade. Click on these titles to order them–or check out all his books (and other great titles) on the Genealogy Gems Book Club webpage.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!