Your ancestors made headlines: Community stories brought to life through our newspaper collection
4-5 minute read
By Daisy Goddard | January 31, 2025
Findmypast's newspaper collection reveals your family tree's colourful stories in black and white. Here are some of the most exciting discoveries made by you.
Sometimes the past arrives quietly — in a faded headline, a surname you recognise, a story that suddenly feels startlingly close to home. Our newspaper archive has a way of doing that. It takes what could have been just another simple detail in your family tree and gives it colour and context.
Search for stories in our newspapers and publications
Explore millions of digitised pages of newspapers and other publications from our British and Irish collections, dating as far back as the 1700s.
These snippets of history don’t just describe events. They show what life felt like for the families who lived through them — the ups, the downs, and everything in between.
Your newspaper discoveries
Here are some of the remarkable discoveries you've made…
A tragedy that rippled across generations
Janet began her search the way so many of us do — by typing a familiar surname into the newspaper archive - Gullifer.
What surfaced was a heart‑wrenching story that changed her family forever. In September 1878, the steamer Princess Alice collided with another vessel on the Thames, sinking in minutes. Hundreds of lives were lost.
The Princess Alice disaster, as depicted in the Illustrated London News.
Among them was Matilda Gullifer, Janet’s great‑grandmother’s sister. Her name appeared again and again in the reports of the disaster — a reminder of how one headline could have a profound effect on just one family.
The tragedy later contributed to the implementation of new safety measures on the Thames. It's been studied by numerous historians and writers, including Joan Lock (The Princess Alice Disaster, 2013). But for Janet, its legacy is much more personal: a deeper understanding of the fragile world her family once moved through.
Janet's moving discovery attests to the detail that can be found within the pages of our newspaper collection.
One of the nation’s early educators
For Dawn Jennifer, newspapers filled in the quiet spaces that records alone couldn’t illuminate. She had traced her 3x great‑grandfather, George John Westfield, from Norfolk to Great Yarmouth and eventually to London. Census entries gave her the basics — dates, addresses, occupations. But it was the newspapers that brought George’s life into sharper focus.
There she discovered that he earned a diploma of licentiate from the College of Preceptors — a remarkable achievement for a schoolteacher in the 19th century and roughly equivalent to a modern MA. Suddenly, George wasn’t just a name in a census. He was a man committed to education, pushing boundaries at a time when the teaching profession was still finding its feet
Through those old pages, Dawn could picture the classrooms he shaped, the students he guided, and the pride he might have felt as he built a life through learning.
A life in the entertainment industry: from entrepreneurship to imprisonment
Bill Marks began, as many of us do, with a simple curiosity about where his family came from. But the deeper he dug, the more unexpected threads he uncovered — enough that he eventually pieced those discoveries into a self‑published history of his family’s remarkable story.
At the start, Bill knew almost nothing about his grandfather, William James Marks. What he found surprised him. Records revealed that William had reinvented himself, taking on the stage name James Marks Creighton when he left his home in Cardiff to pursue the life of a touring actor. A bold leap. A fresh identity. A young man stepping into the wings of a world far bigger than the one he’d left behind.
Newspapers helped Bill follow William’s footsteps. Page after page held snippets of his grandfather’s life — theatre reviews, words from critics, and warm appraisals of the theatres he later managed in Dundee. We can almost imagine the lights coming up, the audience murmuring, the pride he must have felt.
William James Marks featured in the Manchester Evening News.
But not every chapter was an easy one. William found himself caught up in a scandal that led to a brief imprisonment in 1903. A difficult moment for any family. Yet when he walked free, he didn’t disappear into the background. Instead, he stepped forward again — this time working in the early film industry, even inventing a new type of cinema screen.
By tracing William through newspaper reports, Bill was able to follow his grandfather’s life all the way to Manchester, right up to his death in 1935. And there, in the quiet reverence of published obituaries, Bill found something precious: a sense of the legacy William left behind. A man remembered. A life no longer lost in the gaps.
Why newspapers matter to your family history
Births, marriages, deaths, censuses — they form the backbone of your family tree. But newspapers? They fill in the details. They capture the everyday moments: pride, shock, ambition, mischief, hope. The little stories families might never have passed down, yet somehow still belong to you.
From unexpected tragedies to occupational firsts, these community finds show what can happen when you follow a name into the archive. Sometimes you uncover a story that changes the way you see the people who came before you.
We add new pages every single Friday, so there's always more to explore.
With Findmypast, you can access newspapers from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and beyond, covering centuries of British and Irish history. All brought online through partnerships with the British Library and many other publishers.
The stories that made us. The decades that defined us. Explore the eras we think we know – from gaslit Victorian streets to the resilience of post-war Britain – and uncover the "good old days" as they really were in 100 million pages of history.
Newspaper collection FAQs
Where can I find old British newspapers?
Findmypast provides access to an extensive directory of historical newspapers from the British Library and other archives. Browse over millions of pages for free, or take out a free trial to begin exploring the full collection.
How can I find my ancestors in old newspapers?
We have a handy Guide on this very topic, which you can explore here.
What is Britain's biggest-selling newspaper?
The Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard are two of today's most popular newspapers, but it was a very different story in years gone by. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Morning Post was in the top spot, but it was overtaken by the Morning Herald and later The Times by the mid-1850s.
Can I buy a newspaper from a specific date?
While it's not possible to purchase an individual page, you can enjoy unlimited access to our full newspaper archive with an Everything subscription. Why not dive in with no upfront cost by taking a free trial? The potential discoveries are truly limitless.
