British Newspaper Archive now at the State Library

The Illustrated Police News is just one of the many newspapers available in this wonderful archive [Illustrated Police News, May 21 1887]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The latest addition to the Library’s family history e-resources is the British Newspaper Archive, which gives you access to millions of pages of digitised historical newspapers held at the British Library. There are newspaper titles from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and you will find news articles, family notices, obituaries, letters, advertisements and illustrations.
Please note that you need to be within the State Library building to access the British Newspaper Archive and you will also need to register i.e. create your own login and password. Once you have done this you will be able to search, view articles, save (bookmark) articles of interest into different folders and add tags or comments. You will also be able to correct the optical character recognition (OCR) text, making articles easier for other people to find, in a similar way to the National Library of Australia’s Trove website.

Sunday Times newspaper (UK) on trial

Front page, Sunday Times, July 4 1915

The State Library currently has the Sunday Times Historical Archive, 1822 – 2006 (UK) available as a trial e-resource. To access it you need to be within the State Library building.

This newspaper archive, covering more than 180 years, complements our other British newspaper e-resources such as the Times Digital Archive and the Illustrated London News. See the full list of Family History e-resources here.
This is a very useful addition to our collection for both social and family history. Feel free to try it out during the trial and please give us your feedback.

UK Documents Online trial at SLWA

Opening lines from the will of Charles Good, Gentleman, of Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, 15 Nov 1736 (PROB 11/680)

Material which is available through Documents Online on the UK National Archives website is currently available to download free of charge within the State Library of WA building.

This includes pre-1858 wills, Victorian prisoners’ photograph albums, poor law union correspondence, seamen’s wills, WWI prisoner of war interviews, WWI nursing service records and much more.

You never know what you might find within this collection. Try it out before the trial ends on 31 March and please let us know what you think by completing our survey.

Incoming UK passenger lists now available on Ancestry

An exciting new addition to Ancestry are the UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 which have just been scanned in full colour and made available from the Board of Trade series BT26 held at the National Archives in Kew. The BT26 series includes ships arriving in the UK from foreign ports outside Europe and the Mediterranean for 1878-1888 and 1890-1960.

If you have ancestors who visited the UK from Australia, the United States or other parts of the world outside Europe, why not have a look to see if you can find their arrival in Britain? You can search under name, birth year, port of departure, port of arrival, ports on voyage, ship name, shipping line, arrival year and keyword.

Select View Record to see a transcription of the record. At this point you can also click on a link to view information about the ship, and sometimes a photograph, from the Passenger ships and images database.

Viewing the original image of the passenger list will often give extra details such as occupation, address and intended length of stay in the UK.

This wonderful new source is freely available within the State Library building on our Ancestry database. From our home page select Search – Electronic Resources – Genealogy – Ancestry library edition. Once you are in the Ancestry database you need to select the following:

• Search
• UK & Ireland (under Browse by location)
• Click anywhere on the map of the UK
• View all Immigration & Emigration databases
• UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960

The image shown above (003866D) is from the State Library Pictorial Collection and shows the Southern Cross sailing from Fremantle in 1960.