Newcastle Newspapers

[Lynne98]

Hello,
This message is especiallyfor Ticketyboo - I cannot find your post to me, but this morning, I went to FindMyPast and clicked on By Newspaper. It came up with Newcastle Courant, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, Newcastle Journal and Newcastle Guardian. I clicked on Ncle Courant, and had articles come up. However,if I type in a name, and other details, these newspaper choices disapear!  I did get some articles for Ncle Evening Chronicle for 1915 but there are problems there too. The article titles and details are gobbledegook - lower and uppercase letters and strings of numbers, I clicked on one which turned out to be a tobacconist's ad - very large print and badly out of focus. My computer is old - perhaps that is the problem. Thanks for heads up re Brit newspapers - was abt to take out a sub thinking I could access 1905 copies there.
Regards,
Ophir

[stanmapstone]

The only newspaper available for North East, England 1905 is the Morpeth Herald. The Findmypast newspapers are from the  British Newspaper Archive,  http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
What you see when you search are the Optical Character Recognition results, which are, as you say, apparently  gobbledegook, but if they were in clear text there would be no need for anyone to take out a subscription.
Stan

[Gen List Lass]

Great to see all the Newcastle newspapers, I can get right to what I want. I was looking at the FindMyPast website NOT the BL site...

The only snag is that you can only blow them up to a certain enlargement and looking at a 1916 war casualty list, it is still too small to read! Luckily I have a touch screen and can expand them up more. The scrolling seems a bit random too, much pushing and pulling the image around the screen when scrolling wouldn't respond.......

Worst of all, the item you search for isn't highlighted in the resulting image............... took nearly 5 minutes just to find the right person and then find the article heading to see whether he was killed or only injured...............

Gen in NBL England

[Tickettyboo]

What is available on the British Newspapers site is what you will get on Find My Past - they both access the same database, so if you have a sub to FindMyPast, it would be a waste of money to take out a sub to the British Newspaper Archive too.

The database details are (in my opinion) slightly misleading. They give a date range for the first edition they have scanned to the latest edition they have scanned. That does not mean they have a full run in between.

For instance, I got very excited when they finally scanned something from The Shetland Times.  Currently the blurb for availability says it runs from 1872 - 1885. What they actually have is 28 editions from 1872 and 49 from 1885, that's it, nothing in-between. All I can do is wait as patiently as I can and hope that they will add more in the fullness of time :-)

The same blurb on British Newspapers says that at the moment they only have The Newcastle Chronicle for 1915 (331 editions). Again, I am hoping that they add more, but have no idea how the choose the order in which things are scanned ( I actually think they just pull newspaper names and dates out of a hat each morning!)

As Stan says, they have used Optical Character Recognition to scan them (rather than someone typing out what the articles say). That does mean it can take a while to look through the results to see if you can find the one you are looking for, but I am so pleased to have access to at least some newspapers I am happy to spend the time doing that in order to chase up results.

It's not ideal, but for the moment its a big step in the right direction as previously my only other option was to travel to Newcastle to try to find what I wanted in the microfilms of the Newcastle Chronicle at the library. That isn't ideal when time is limited either as though they have a full run, searching by name is not an option on a microfilm.

Boo

[Lynne98]

Dear Gwen and Boo,
Thank you for your info re British newspapers - and saving me from taking out what would have been a useless subscription.  Like you Gen I was looking for a war casualty and thought it would be highlighted; the print was so small I was trying to use a magnifying glass.

I need to be patient - Newcastle's turn will come in time and at least some of the other papers I've accessed have been useful.
Thanks again,
Ophir

[Lynne98]

Apology Gen - Why did I not check my post first and see that I had referred to you  as Gwen. In my defence I have only  one working eye at present and am finding mono instead of stereo site a bit of a challenge.  So, the lesson for me is to check first.
Ophir

[Gen List Lass]

Orphir

Don't worry about it:-)People with two good eyes sometimes get my name wrong:-)

I had to give up on the newspapers yesterday, the light was too dim and my eyes tired, the print too tiny......  c'est la vie.

Gen in NBL England

[Tickettyboo]

I have been looking at the newspapers via Find My Past and thought about this problem of small print that you seem to be having (I don't but I have a very large screen). Not sure if it would work on a tablet but certainly on a computer if you look at the navigation and zoom icons and click on the bottom pic of a screen, then it shows the page in full screen and is much easier to read.



Boo