Following the renewal of a long-term partnership, Findmypast and the British Library have pledged to make millions of historical newspaper pages free to view online.
Right now, more than one million pages are free to search and explore on both Findmypast and its sister site, the British Newspaper Archive. This will be expanded by more than 2.7 million additional free pages over the next four years.
In its blog post, Findmypast said, “By providing free access to key areas of this unparalleled resource, Findmypast and the British Library are offering the public unique opportunities to uncover the stories behind historical events both great and small, as they happened; transforming their understanding of both the past and the present.”
There are currently 158 free newspapers on offer, dating from 1720 to 1880 and covering a diverse array of histories, locations, and topics. The newspapers selected were digitized as part of four special British Library projects:
- 19th Century Newspapers: a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library’s first major newspaper digitization program
- Heritage Made Digital: an ongoing project to transform digital access to rare and early newspapers, focusing on newspapers in a poor or unfit condition
- Living with Machines: another ongoing project, jointly led by the Library and the Alan Turing Institute, which has been digitizing selected UK regional newspapers as part of a major study of the British industrial age and using artificial intelligence tools to undertake new kinds of historical inquiry
- The Endangered Archives Programme: a project that facilitates the digitization of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect, or physical deterioration
Many of the papers included have been specifically chosen to help shed new light on diverse and previously underrepresented communities and their histories. Highlights from the collection include:
- Barbadian (1822-1861) – a Caribbean publication that covers the transition of Barbados from the colonial, pre-modern to the modern era, including the Emancipation (1834), and the end of the apprenticeship system (1838)
- British Emancipator (1837-1840) – an anti-slavery newspaper that fought for the abolition of the system of apprenticeship, which was put into place after slavery was abolished in the British Colonies
- British Miner and General Newsman (1862-1867) – a journal devoted to working miners, which went through a number of titles including The Miner, The Workman’s Advocate, and The Commonwealth
- Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register (1803-1836) – a famous and hugely information-rich vehicle for the ideas and opinions of the great nineteenth-century radical William Cobbett
- The Examiner (1808-1880) – a leading radical weekly, edited by Leigh Hunt, with contributors including William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Percy Shelley
- Illustrated Sporting News and Theatrical and Musical Review (1862-1870) – a lively, visually rich newspaper covering a wide range of sports and theatrical events, with many fine illustrations
- Royal Gazette of Jamaica (1779-1840) – a West Indies newspaper notorious for its slavery advertisements
- Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times (1847-1863) – one of the earliest newspapers produced for an exclusively female audience
- Morning Herald (1800-1869) – founded in 1780, a national daily that for a number of years rivaled The Times in importance
- Poor Man’s Guardian (1831-1835) – the most successful and influential of the radical unstamped (and thus illegal) newspapers of the early 1830s
- Sun (1801-1871) – a daily evening national newspaper, founded in 1792, originally with pro-government and anti-French revolutionary stance, before changing to advocate liberal and free trade principles
Originally launched in 2011, Findmypast and the British Library’s partnership has delivered the most significant mass digitization of newspapers the UK has ever seen. The British Newspaper Archive and Findmypast are currently home to more than 44 million fully searchable pages from over a thousand regional, national, and specialty titles dating from 2009 all the way back to 1699. (Most of the pages require a subscription.) Their ever-growing digital catalogue covers every corner of the British Isles, as well as a number of former British territories including Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Barbados, and Jamaica.
Search the free newspaper archives on Findmypast. Once on the site, researchers can search by name and keyword and narrow down the search results using filters, such as date, place, newspapers, and type of access (free or subscriber).
Two YouTube videos
Learn how to search this free newspaper collection in Findmypast’s new 46-minute video on YouTube.
For people who just want to dive into their newspaper research — or those with a short attention span — Findmypast also produced a one-minute video about the collection.
