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A new dictionary of 50,000 surnames and their origins has just been published.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/17/dictionary-of-50000-surnames-and-their-origins-published

+ The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland is published in hardback print format (four volumes), ebook format and for library subscription online via Oxford Reference for a UK retail price of £400.

The dictionary will be accessible for free via public libraries that purchase the resource. Members of the public can request that their library purchase the dictionary by completing a form at https://global.oup.com/academic/library-recommend/

and another 15,000 still to come !

It does not end here. AHRC has awarded UWE Bristol a further grant to continue the project so that another 15,000 surnames with just 20 current bearers or more can be included.

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http://anno.onb.ac.at/

This site has complete digital images of hundreds of austrian newspapers ranging from from 1568 to 1945.
It is a fabulous site if your ancestors were austrian ("austrian in the sense of "austro-hungarian empire", which included parts of Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Tschoslovakia, etc, etc)

Until recently the site wasn't indexed, so you had to know which paper you were looking for and then read all the pages to find what you were searching for.

Recently I visited the site again, and found this:

neu ANNO-Suche: Volltextsuche in historischen Zeitungen (1689-1945)

i.e. New ! full-text search ....
So now you can search for names, places or events and find the newspapers, where they were printed.

The problem:
 - the whole site is in german - the papers themselves are (obviously) all in german, but there is no "language" button to change the site display to english.
- most of the older papers (up to the 1930's) are printed "Fraktur" font, which makes them even harder to read.

But all in all, if you have ancestors from the K.u.K. Austria, who did anything which would get them in the papers, this is the place to look

I was lucky with my Margulies family: my grandfather and his three brothers were journalists a/o lawyers a/o politically active, etc, etc so they were often in the papers.  There is even a nespaper showing arrivals of the Kur-guests in Bad Ischl - in 1929 the whole family must have had a reunion there, as I have found all their names here. An interesting side-line is that two of the families came "with servant" or "and her maid"

I also found an obituary notice for a great aunt with her age at death and full name Isabella. Until then I had only known that there was another daughter , "Bella", who "died young".

A tip for searching: the Austrians (then) were sticklers for formality. If your ancestors had an academic doctor title (or any other title), then the names are always given with title, as in "Dr. Joe Soap" and never as just "Joe Soap".  The search found two "Emil Margulies" so this also helped me (apart from the context) to decide whether the article was referring to my great-uncle Dr. "Emil Margulies"  or not. 

regards,
Bob

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