Family History Class Notes – Using Newspapers in Family History Research

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and people are staying at home, many have found time to pursue their hobbies and there is a world -wide upsurge of interest in family history. Most are using online resources, including newspapers.

I believe that in the past, newspapers were the most under -utilized genealogical resource, but new technology is now changing that.

Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, the early 19th Century British poet, historian and Whig politician once stated that ‘the only true history of a country is found in its newspapers’.

When you consider the first Australian newspaper began in Sydney just fifteen years after the arrival of the First Fleet, just imagine how much history of Australian families and their overseas connections must be buried in Australian newspapers.

We can read all the political, economic and social history books available for background context of our ancestors, but we can certainly better understand the lives of these ancestors when we find their stories, items and notices in old newspapers.

Types of Newspapers

  • National
  • Regional
  • Local
  • Ethnic and Foreign Language
  • Religious
  • Political
  • Literary
  • Military

Access to Australian Historical Newspapers

In Australia, the National and State Libraries have the responsibility of tracking down and collecting newspapers published, even today. They have many volumes of bound hardcopies of both Overseas and Australian newspapers. These can be located through their catalogues.

 

Regional and Community Libraries, historical societies and museums may also have original hard-copy or microfilm copies of newspapers, particularly those of the local area. You may have to travel to these local institutions to access these newspapers or you may be able to make arrangements for someone to view them on your behalf. There may be costs and fees associated with this service.

 

On-line Digital Access

In the past, it could be said that local and family historians did not use newspapers in their research because of poor accessibility, but this is no longer the case. Over the last few years, millions of pages of newspapers throughout the world have been scanned and digitized, and made available on-line to the public, through commercial ventures of subscription web sites, such as ancestry.com and findmypast.com, as well as historical document programs in National and State Archives and libraries.

Perhaps the most important source for Australian 19th Century and early 20th Century newspapers on-line are through the National Library of Australia, in their Historical Newspapers program, 1803-1954 at :-

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper and the historical journals, and magazines program through the Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845. This is part of the Australian Co-operative Digitization Project, which can be found at http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/.

Between these two sites hundreds of titles are offered. These are in pdf format and can be searched by word or phrase, which makes them a very accessible resource. However one important warning- not all surviving issues of newspapers have been microfilmed, digitized and put on- line.

 

The first newspaper in New South Wales was the Sydney Gazette which first appeared on 5th March 1803 and was printed by George Howe, a convict. It was published for many years, ceasing in 1842.

As well as including functions many of us associate with a newspaper it also carried official governmental orders and proclamations, serving as the government gazette until 1832 when the New South Wales Government Gazette was inaugurated. Several other newspapers were published in Sydney over the years including:-

  • The Australian-(1824-1848);
  • Sydney Monitor (1828-1838);
  • The Sydney Herald-(1831-1842) (later the Sydney Morning Herald);
  • The Colonist-(1835-1840);
  • Australian Chronicle-(1839-1843)
  • Sydney Chronicle-(1846-1848).

I have had extensive experience of these Sydney newspapers and using them in local and family history, and have spent many hundreds of hours compiling selected indexes. Although all are now out of print they can be found in Libraries and Family History Societies.

 

These include

1. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 1 1830-1832

[Nola Mackey,1996,65pp, ISBN 1875840133,Out of Print]

2. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 2 1833-1835

[Nola Mackey,1996,107pp,ISBN 187584015X,Out of Print]

3. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 3 1836-1837

[Nola Mackey,1996,91pp,ISBN 1875840176, Out of Print]

4. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 4 1838

[Nola Mackey,1994,65pp,ISBN 18758409192,Out of Print]

5. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 5 1839

[Nola Mackey,1994,67pp,ISBN 1875840214,Out of Print]

6. Index of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Sydney Newspapers Vol 6 1840

[Nola Mackey,1995, 64pp, ISBN 1875840230,Out of Print]

 

Here are some examples of Birth, Death and Marriage Notices and Reports in newspapers which allows you so see the range and type of information given.

Birth Notices

Marriage Notices

Marriage Report

Death Notice

 

Death Notice 2

 

Death Notice3

Death Report

 

In Memoriam Notice

Inquest Report

As wonderful as it is having this electronic access to newspapers family historians need to remember. One document or newspaper item concerning an event is not proof.

Assessing Newspapers as a Family History Source

  1. Do not automatically take the published word as gospel, and proof of what happened. Look at the evidence and how it was presented. Reports of Inquests and Court Proceeding are likely to be correct as the evidence is taken under oath, but an obituary or biography of a person’s life may contain untruths and exaggerations.
  2. If there were more than one newspaper being published in the area in a time period look at them all. You will be surprised to learn they will not report the same event exactly the same. There may be more information in one than the other.
  3. Not all newspapers are equal- and there is good reporting and bad reporting and much depends on the editor of the paper at the time.
  4. Newspapers have always been in the business of selling news, but they have always come under the Crown laws concerning slander and misrepresentation of facts. Some owner/editors stretched these boundaries and have found themselves in Court. There have been several newspapers who were sent to the wall and insolvency through court cases concerning slandering opposition newspapers.
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Family History Class Notes – What is Family History?

Genealogy is the study of the relationships between groups of people, generation by generation, and is part of the wider study of family history.  Ancestral and Descendant Charts are often used to represent this. These compiled and charted genealogies are often called family trees and are a representation of the skeleton of a family’s history.

 

Image from Google Images -retrieved 8 March 2010family-tree-printable

Family History is much more and includes matters such as your ancestors’ appearance, occupations, and day-to-day life; how they were affected by, and reacted to, the social conditions and historical events of the time. A study of these things may give you the answers to some leading questions concerning your family – such as why they emigrated to Australia rather than America.

Baxter Family Histories

Both Surnames and Christian names are very important to your family history, as they are a key to a person’s identity, and therefore their life.

Remember there is no such thing as a ‘correct’ way to spell a particular Family or Surname, or indeed even Christian or Given names, and over a lifetime a person’s name may be spelled and recorded in many ways by the person themselves, or by others. Always check various possible spellings when looking for your ancestors.

Also note there can be persons of the same Surname, Christian Name, and of the approximate age living in the same place and at the same time. They may, or may not be related in some way. This can be particularly so if the Surname is rather ‘common’, for example, Smith or Jones, etc..

The main reason people are interested in family history is that they want to know more about and understand themselves. Who they are, where they came from and why they like the things they do or where their talents come from? Studying your family history can answer many of these questions.

When researching your family history the place to start is yourself.

You are the main person and anchor for your family history.

Did you know your family history is unique? The only other people in the whole world, who have the same ‘family tree’ as you, are your full blood siblings -brothers and sisters. If you are an only child, you are the only person who has that ‘ family tree’. You may share ‘twigs’ and ‘branches’ with many other people, but not the whole ‘tree’.

Therefore, you cannot do your family history on the Internet in an afternoon, no matter what the ‘ads’ may tell you. Nor is ‘family history’ a competition to see how many names you can collect on your ‘ tree.’

When we begin our family history we need to ask ourselves these questions:

What information have I already got?

How am I going to record and organize this information?

How am I going to track my progress or the lack of it?