Findmypast's free newspapers: explore over two million historical newspaper pages

5-6 minute read

By Daisy Goddard | July 4, 2023

In partnership with the British Library, we have made a large portion of our digitised newspaper pages available to you for free. With Findmypast, uncovering your family's stories couldn't be easier...

Upon the renewal of our long-term partnership with the British Library in 2021, we pledged along with our partners to make millions of historical newspaper pages from our newspaper collection free to view online.

We're delighted to announce that over 2.4 million pages are now free to search and explore on both Findmypast and our sister site, the British Newspaper Archive. Over the next three years, this is due to be expanded to five million.

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Originally launched in 2011, Findmypast and the British Library’s partnership has delivered the most significant mass digitisation of newspapers the UK has ever seen.

The British Newspaper Archive and Findmypast are currently home to more than 68 million fully-searchable pages from over a thousand regional, national, and specialty titles, covering hundreds of years of history.

Our ever-growing digital catalogue covers every corner of the British Isles as well as a number of former British territories including Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Barbados and Jamaica.

Previously, this vast cultural treasure was held entirely in hard copy and microfilm, meaning travel and hours of painstaking manual research for anyone wishing to explore its contents. Now anyone, anywhere in the world, can uncover millions of articles across hundreds of titles, in just a few simple clicks.

With the advice of our experts, finding what you're looking for in the newspaper collection is more straightforward than ever.

Our free newspaper titles

Our 2.4 million free newspaper pages span across 403 titles, dating from 1699 to 1900 and covering a diverse array of locations and topics. The newspapers selected were digitised as part of four special British Library projects:

19th Century Newspapers: A project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library’s first major newspaper digitisation programme.
Heritage Made Digital: An ongoing project to transform digital access to rare and early newspapers, focusing on newspapers in a poor or unfit condition.
Living with Machines: Another ongoing project, jointly led by the Library and the Alan Turing Institute, which has been digitising selected UK regional newspapers as part of a major study of the British industrial age and using artificial intelligence tools to undertake new kinds of historical enquiry.
The Endangered Archives Programme: A project that facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration.

Illuminating forgotten stories

Many of the papers included have been specifically chosen to help you shed new light on diverse and previously underrepresented communities and their histories. Highlights from the collection include:

Barbadian, (1822-1861) – a fascinating Caribbean publication that covers the transition of Barbados from the colonial, pre-modern to the modern era, including the Emancipation (1834), and the end of the apprenticeship system (1838).
British Emancipator, (1837-1840) – an anti-slavery newspaper that fought for the abolition of the system of apprenticeship, which was put into place after slavery was abolished in the British Colonies.
British Miner and General Newsman, (1862-1867) – a journal devoted to working miners, which went through a number of titles including The Miner, The Workman’s Advocate and The Commonwealth.
Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, (1803-1836) – a famous and hugely information-rich vehicle for the ideas and opinions of the great nineteenth-century radical William Cobbett.
The Examiner, (1808-1880) – a leading radical weekly, edited by Leigh Hunt, with contributors including William Hazlitt, John Keats and Percy Shelley.
Illustrated Sporting News and Theatrical and Musical Review, (1862-1870) – a lively, visually rich newspaper covering a wide range of sports and theatrical events, with many fine illustrations.
Royal Gazette of Jamaica, (1779-1840) – a West Indies newspaper notorious for its slavery advertisements.
Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times, (1847-1863) - one of the earliest newspapers produced for an exclusively female audience.
Morning Herald, (1800-1869) – founded in 1780, a national daily that for a number of years rivalled The Times in importance.
Poor Man’s Guardian, (1831-1835) - the most successful and influential of the radical unstamped (and thus illegal) newspapers of the early 1830s.
Sun, (1801-1871) – a daily evening national newspaper, founded in 1792, originally with pro-government and anti-French revolutionary stance, before changing to advocate liberal and free trade principles.

Other specialist titles, including illustrated, politically divisive and philosophical newspapers, include:

Berthold's Political Handkerchief, (1831) - part of the British Library's Heritage Made Digital programme, this newspaper was originally printed on calico fabric to avoid the infamous newspaper stamp tax.
Illustrated London Life, (1843) - this beautifully illustrated title aimed to ‘embrace and illustrate every description of Metropolitan Life in all its phases and aspects,’ endeavouring ‘to amuse the public without going far from town'.
Porcupine, (1800-1801) - named after its prickly editor William Corbett, this newspaper was vehemently anti-French and decidedly anti-revolution.
Francis’s Metropolitan News, (1895) - printer R. S. Francis used blocks of colour to highlight different articles throughout this paper and featured a range of illustrations, making it stand out from its contemporaries.
The Age, (1852-1853) - a rather infamous title, The Age had a reputation for specialising in ‘scurrilous and satirical gossip’ about celebrities of the day.
The Patriot, (1832-1866) - this London newspaper presented itself as a moral and philosophical repository for political thought, with editor Matthew Campbell Browne hoping to influence the reform of Parliament and instate an equal Representation of People.

Other highlights include an incredible 80 years of Scottish history documented in the free-to-view Glasgow Herald, spanning 1820-1900, and the 50,000 pages that comprise international title the Friend of India and Statesman between 1852 and 1883.

By providing free access to key areas of this unparalleled resource, Findmypast and the British Library are offering you the unique opportunity to uncover the stories behind historical events both great and small, as they happened; transforming our understanding of both the past and the present.

This detail-rich archive sees the lives of ordinary people played out in print. Readers can discover contemporary reports on the struggles of the poor and working class, the daily lives of England’s mining communities, the evils of slavery, the campaign to end them and much more.

As well as providing free access, our use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and machine learning also means exploring these unique resources is easier than ever. You can search billions of lines of printed text by name, date, keyword or phrase, all from the comfort of your own home.

FAQs

If you've still got unanswered questions, these FAQs may just be able to help. For further guidance, you can get in touch with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

How can I read old newspapers for free?

Thanks to our partnership with the British Library, over two million of our historical newspaper pages are available to read for free. Scroll up for the names of some of the newspapers included, as well as the years covered within our free-to-view collection. You can access these titles via our newspaper search, which allows you to search by a person's name and keywords, and narrow your search down further with the filters provided.

What information can you learn from old newspapers?

From local to national titles, there are so many stories contained within the pages of the Findmypast newspaper collection. There's essentially no limit to the discoveries you can make, although here are some key things you can expect to find when you look in the right place:

Biographical details about your ancestors, through birth, marriage, and death notices.
Historical context for the time in which they lived, like the national events and hot topics of the day.
Photographs of people and places throughout history.

And so much more...

Is the British Newspaper Archive the same as Findmypast?

The British Newspaper Archive is a sister site of Findmypast. It is the product of the partnership between Findmypast and the British Library, to digitise the British Library's vast newspaper collection and make them readily available online for the very first time. Over two million historical pages are available to view for free, while Findmypast members with a Pro or Premium subscription can access all of the pages within the archive.

Share your family stories

Have you made any exciting discoveries using our newspaper collection? Whether you've solved a family mystery or uncovered the story of an elusive ancestor, we'd love to hear about it. With this handy form, it's easier to share your story with us than ever before.