Hi

Could someone please advise if there were local newspapers in the Forest which might have been in print during the period 1750 to 1850.
The areas I am specifically interested in are Bulley, Birdwood and Churcham.
My Ancestors lived in these Parishes during this period and I would like to read more about the period and hopefully find more information on their lives.
As I live in Australia, my knowledge of the Geography of the FOD is limited.
Also if there are newspapers which would apply, are their Archives on line ?
I already have some information which I obtained from Welsh Newspapers on line Archives but the Names of the publications and their coverage confuses me.

Thank you in advance

Sid Toomey

Hi Sid and Happy New Year !
As far as I know, as the population of the "inner" Forest only started growing significantly c1850, there were no local papers within the Dean until the Cinderford's "Dean Forest Mercury" which started after abt 1880. So this is probably too late for you, plus it's not available online. Before that time this "inner" Forest (ie the area twixt Ruardean/Coleford/Cinderford/Lydney) would have been mainly covered by newspapers from Monmouth, Gloucester and maybe Hereford/Ross.

The Parishes you mention are on the very eastern edge of the Forest of Dean area, only about 5 miles from Gloucester city centre, so I think you need to look for Gloucester-based newspapers. The British Newspaper Archive (BNA) website gives online access to the Gloucester Citizen from 1877 onwards (it's still in print), the Gloucester Journal from 1793 and the now-defunct Glos Chronicle from 1833. I think this would be your best starting point, you can also use the BNA site to try the Hereford Journal and Times from 1781.
see http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/home/NewspaperTitles#G

I recommend to only signup for a BNA subscription after spending some time using their free search facility, so you can get a feel for using the site's search engine (less input often gives more output !) and what you might expect to find, before actually starting your paid subscription. It's good that you can subscribe for quite short periods of time hence less outlay, which is what I do on an occasional basis. Within a few weeks I can find and download dozens if not hundreds of interesting articles, and by signing-up for their monthly newsletter emails I then often receive special offers giving full access for as little as £1 per month.
This prior thread has some pointers about how to best use the BNA website.
http://forum.forest-of-dean.net/index.php?id=36876

You can access the BNA newspapers if you are a subscriber to the FindMyPast and GenesReunited sites, altho I don't hink they allow such complete coverage of all the newspapers/years as the BNA site does.

If you have any specific enquiries I'm happy to try and help search the site. My own subscription has just recently lapsed, but their search facility still works, in fact I think they offer a few "free" downloads as an incentive to new users. Also, this forum includes a few subscribers who might possibly help out a couple of your specific enquiries.

I've just searched the word "Bulley" in the BNA site, having first set the filters to concentrate on just "Gloucestershire". Sadly, altho the papers have coverage from 1750 onwards, it only gave four hits for "Bulley" before 1800, all from 1795-1799. Furthermore, these very old newspapers have old-fashioned characters which can be extra-challenging for the automatic Optical Character Recognition systems that search the pages, so they often mis-interpret the findings. This, added to the site's deliberate "camouflaging" of results when a non-subscriber like me is searching, means the transcribed "hits" may be hard to read until the actual newspaper page is downloaded and read. Hopefully this link will take you to my findings, and you'll see what I mean. Thankfully, searching "Birdwood" and "Churcham" gives more numerous hits. However there don't appear to be many fidnings for "Toomey" in these places in your ideal timeframe, although if nowt else that suggests they were a good law-abiding bunch, unlike some of my ancestors !
http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1750-01-01/1799-12-31?basicsear...

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Ref your comment abt the Welsh papers website, I've not used it for a while, but I recall that if you click on the title of the newspaper who's article you've opened from the findings of your searches, it's a hyperlink that takes you to a brief statement giving the history/locality of that particular newspaper title; I hope it still does this ? If not, please ask me and I'll try and clarify any queries you have.

Hoping this helps, but please feel free to ask for more.
Jeff

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Here's a good summary of the history of local Gloucestershire newspapers which largely confirms the above.
https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/media/1904/gloucestershire_newspapers_2016_v1-24402.pdf