Find my past newspaper articles

[dahaniuk]

Today Find My Past has published millions of pages of historical newspapers from across England, Wales and Scotland.

I have already found my Dad and his Brother receiving swimming medals. I have my Dad's medal and certificate which makes it all the nicer.

[Janet]

Just found one article about my grandfather. This site is now accessible free for those with FMP world wide sub in case anybody had not realised.

Janet

[Anne in Carlisle]

Can't get on at the moment. Must be everyone looking at them!

Anne

[keldon]

It's the almost the same database as the http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.
FMP coverage: http://www.findmypast.co.uk/cms/fmp/...s-coverage.pdf
BNA coverage: http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.c...ewspaperTitles

Now makes the subscription for FMP an interesting challenger to Ancestry.

[ftfmk]

This coverage has been promised for findmypast.com, but doesn't seem to have been implemented there yet.

[Janet]

Yes it is on FMP as I have been using the resource through FMP yesterday morning, however they were having huge problems last night as the site has been overloaded with too many people trying to access the site!! They say they are aware of the problem and addressing the issues so that the problems will be resolved as soon as possible, shades of what happened when the 1901 Census hit the internet!! It was bound to happen with such a huge resource as the Newspapers. We will just have to be patient until the problems have been ironed out! I think that one of the problems is that it is free to view the resource by anybody with or without a subscription, but unless you have a world wide sub then you will have to pay to access the actual information. They appear to be doing what Newspapersonline did when that first came out, that is giving you little tasters first which aspect of the research is now unavailble on newspapersonline, so no doubt that could be one of the reasons for the overload.

Janet

[Janet]

Just been on FMP, a bit slow but found another member of the family in the army!! No wonder I coud not fnd him on 1851 and 1861 census. The reason he was in the newspaper was for absenting himself from Militia duty in 1863 which then led me to some army records. Amazing what you can find from newspapers now they are digitised and online available to all! Looking forward to more papers coming online.

Be warned though if you have names like Noble, Cope, Hight/Height then you will get the "height" of the river so and so or the person who is able to "cope" with something or the most "noble" lord of whatever and that can be annoying! Inputting the place as a key word may help, but not always, if there are more than one of the same place in the UK. Hope that one gets sorted at some time. The other annoying point at present is that if you input William Cope then you not only get all the Williams of whatever name as well as the ones who are unable or are able to cope so it can be irritating, as there seems to be no way of filtering. In a google search I would have put "William Cope" in parenthesis and that would filter out a lot. Maybe as we use the site more we will find other ways of filtering out the unwanted material so any ideas welcome!!

Janet

[Mary from Italy]

The best bet is to search first on the British Newspapers site, which lets you use inverted commas, then when you've got the date of the issue you want it shouldn't be too hard to find it on FMP.

[Janet]

Thank you Mary, I did not think of that!

Janet

[keldon]

I tried pay per view yesterday as an experiment. The search pointed me to page 5. I selected page 5. It gave page 4. So the moral of this is to only use it via a subscription. At least it doesn't matter if there's a problem.

[margaretmarch]

I tried pay per view yesterday as an experiment. The search pointed me to page 5. I selected page 5. It gave page 4. So the moral of this is to only use it via a subscription. At least it doesn't matter if there's a problem.

I would report that to them and ask for a refund of the credit used.
Margaret

[keldon]

I would report that to them and ask for a refund of the credit used.
Margaret

Already in hand, thanks.