Newspaper articles and excerpts can be a useful tool for not only researching your ancestors, but understanding more about the social, cultural and political attitudes of the time. While notices of births, marriages and deaths are useful in tracking specific ancestors, newspapers can also help contextualise your research and add colour to your family tree.
It’s with this in mind that we’re excited to announce the launch of more than one million pages from The Guardian and The Observer on Newspapers.com. 1,094,632 pages from editions between 1821-2003 have been made available on Newspapers.com, covering a generous period of social, economic and political change within Britain and the wider world.
Founded in Manchester in 1821, the paper was originally known as the Manchester Guardian until it became The Guardian in 1959. 182 years of searchable Guardian pages cover some of the biggest breaking news of its time, including the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, Britain’s declaration of war in 1914 and the proclamation of victory in Europe on May 8th, 1945.
Search functionalities within Newspapers.com allow you to narrow searches by date, range or keyword, making it easy to research specific times or areas, as well as searching for ancestors’ names or details. Along with advanced search tools, Newspapers.com’s image viewer also allows you to zoom in and out of pages and print, download or share specific pages you’ve found.
Only interested in a specific article or excerpt? Use the clipping tool to highlight and share sections of the page to your social channels or download a .pdf copy for your files. A handy tool for family historians is the ‘Save to Ancestry’ tool which allows you to easily share the clipping back to your account, even attaching the clipping to a particular ancestor in your tree so you can reference or return to the clipping when desired.
Find out more about how to browse and clip content with this helpful video from the Newspapers.com team.
The Guardian joins more than 200 other newspaper titles available on Newspapers.com. Access to Newspapers.com Basic and The Guardian and Observer collections is included in our All Access Membership, which also provides unlimited access to all the records on Ancestry and Fold3.