I've been researching my family history for a couple of years and now have a solid understanding of who's in my tree and their birth, marriage and death dates, where they lived, and their occupations, built up from a mix of Ancestry.com records, a good collection of handed-down photos, quite a few birth/death/marriage certificates, and a limited amount of rooting around graveyards and church records.
What I feel I am missing is much knowledge of their lives beyond that, such as any specific episodes or things they did.
Therefore I am thinking of subscribing to one of those online newspaper archives and trawling through those to see if any of them get a mention, but I'm skeptical that most people ever do anything to get a mention in a newspaper. I'd be interested to hear if people have found looking through newspaper archives for such individual stories of much help. Or are they more useful for just getting a general feel for what life was like in a specific town/county at a specific date?
Suggestions on good strategies would be much appreciated. I just suspect that it's the sort of thing that could consume a lot of time for little reward unless you have a disciplined way of going about it and know what to look for!
Thanks!
