Hints re British Newspaper Archives website. (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Tuesday, May 08, 2012, 18:06 (4578 days ago) @ SUE LAWTON

Hi Sue,
first thanks for clarifying a while back about the Hereford Times coverage, apologies for not posting before. Yes you're completely right of course with your hints. Wrt the use of abbreviated names & initials I think in the old days life was generally more formal, plus as you quite rightly say I've no doubt economy of type space, ink and labour were foremost especially for the smaller local papers. I had the good fortune of visiting a small Cinderford printers in my childhood and the sheer amount of highly skilled hard physical effort that went into producing every single page was an eyeopener; no wonder in those days you rarely saw the socalled "typo" errors that modern newspapers contain despite their being produced on word processors with inbuilt spellcheckers etc !. Also those old local papers were solid type throughout with few if any photographs to help bump-up the page count, never mind pages & pages of house adverts.

When I started using the BNA site I got annoyed by getting too many hits from areas that clearly didnt relate to me, hence as you say nowdays I generally use the filters to select our region, so usually the excellent Citizen records plus the Hereford Times and Western Daily Press. I also usually filter my search to only articles and not adverts (as there weren't any shopkeepers, farmers or market gardeners etc in my line so the adverts, as interesting as they are, can hide "my trees within the woods" as t'were). That said I find some of the non-commercial small ads most interesting, so many people searching to employ nannies etc etc, a different world !

I guess like most sites and their search engines it's a case of
Trial & error + Patience + Practice makes perfect = Great results.

LATER ADDITION FOR REFERENCE:
Re the BNA website, this page lists all the Newspapers in the site's archive and the dates covered, so for us the local papers are currently

Gloucester Citizen 1877 - 1950
Gloucester Journal 1940 - 1949
Hereford Journal 1781 - 1867
Hereford Times 1832 - 1934

plus the likes of the

Bristol Mercury 1716 - 1900
Western Daily Press 1858 - 1949
And of course the bigger nationals for really major events such as murders etc.

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/home/NewspaperTitles

UPDATE 2013:
I see the wellknown FindMyPast subscription website now includes access to the BNA site to FMP subscribers, albeit sadly not thro their UK Public Library Portals.

FURTHER 2013 UPDATE:
Another new and entirely free website full of Welsh Newspapers is detailed in this thread, highly recommended !.
http://forum.forest-of-dean.net/index.php?id=40632