London Gazette celebrates 351st (not the 350th) anniversary — and it’s all online

When I published the following post this morning, I hadn’t realized I had missed the 350th anniversary of The London Gazette by one year. It was celebrated November 7, 2015, not in 2016.  I guess that’s what happens when you’re not on the invitation list.

The good news is we now have 351 years of The London Gazette online. I’ve now corrected this post.

Yesterday, November 7, The London Gazette celebrated its 350th 351st anniversary as the oldest surviving English newspaper, and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK. This publication is an excellent resource for genealogists, and all 350 351 years of it are available online for free on the website, The Gazette.

On this easy-to-navigate website, you will find notices about marriage acts, dissolution of partnerships, insolvency (bankruptcy), wills, and companies. Insolvency notices, for example, can help track an individual or company’s financial history.

In the About section, The Gazette says genealogists can sketch out a soldier’s career. “From England’s Glorious Revolution to despatches that detail events of the Crimean War, and honours and awards for gallantry or meritorious service – as well as officer commissions, appointments and promotions, and casualties – it’s a key resource for the researcher.”

Note that your ancestors do not have to have been a member of the posh upper class for their names to appear in The London Gazette.

I was very surprised to see some of my ancestors’ names in the notices, and unfortunately, for at least one of them, it was a case of insolvency.

The London Gazette, January 20, 1891, page 383.

For example, one of my ancestors, who was a builder, partnered with a contractor. When their partnership ended, a notice of dissolution was published. (See image on the right.)

To find the notice, I entered his full name in the search box with quotation marks: “Joseph Henry Haire.” I also tried different versions of his name, with and without the middle name.

In an edition of The London Gazette a few years later, I found an insolvency notice for the same ancestor. Clearly, it was not the best of times for him.

Easy to search
When conducting a search in the online collection, try exact words and phrases. You can choose the notice category, date range, and location. When you find a page you want to keep, you can save it in a personal account, email it to yourself, or share it on social media.

I recommend watching the two-minute video, Searching The Gazette to quickly understand how to maximize your search results.

Three Gazettes
The Gazette online collection is more than The London Gazette. In 2014, The Edinburgh Gazette and The Belfast Gazette, whose forerunner was The Dublin Gazette, came together with The London Gazette to form The Gazette website.

When conducting your search, you can easily remove one or two of these gazettes to limit your search.

But don’t be too quick to remove one of the gazettes. I found an insolvency notice for my Londoner Joseph Henry Haire in the Edinburgh Gazette, not in The London Gazette. This could be a case of the OCR not finding his name because of the clarity of the original London publication and/or the scan or his name may be split on two different lines.

In the end, no matter where your ancestor lived in the United Kingdom, enter their name. You may be surprised.

You can read more about The London Gazette and its anniversary on The National Archives Blog.