Yorkshire Newspapers: digital copies online

Image by Grant Cochrane, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The online British Newspaper Archive includes many Yorkshire newspapers. Recent additions include the Yorkshire Evening Post.

I have used newspapers to find birth, marriage, death and funeral notices, obituaries, and other articles that provide information and historical context for my family history. I usually start by searching for surnames, village names and relevant keywords such as 'accountant', 'carpenter' or 'inquest'.

The rapidly expanding collection of searchable digitised British newspapers is available on two sites:

• British Newspaper Archive Web site


• British Newspapers collection within FindMyPast.

Both sites now offer very affordable one-month subscriptions.

Before searching, read Top Tips for Searching the Newspapers.

As more papers are digitised, details are added to the list of newspaper titles online.

British news and family notices were often reprinted in Australian newspapers, so you should also search Trove (a magnificent free site created by the National Library of Australia).

More Yorkshire Parish Register Indexes

More than 450,000 parish records for Yorkshire, Northumberland, Durham, Wiltshire and Suffolk have just been added to FindMyPast's UK parish records collection.

I have lots of Yorkshire ancestors, and many of them moved to the county of Durham in the mid-1800s. I was therefore delighted to hear that these new records include 7,113 Ryedale baptisms, marriages and burials (1754-1999);  22,687 Sheffield baptisms (1837-1968);  8,181 Sheffield marriages (1824-1991); and 27,420 Northumberland and Durham burials (1587-2009).

These parish records are available as a result of the ongoing partnership between FindMyPast and the Federation of Family History Societies. There are millions more records to come, so watch for news from FindMyPast.

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