Old British News is all about discovery. Insignificant items that reveal the bigger picture about your family or community. The important life-changing stories that altered our world forever. Some hidden articles lost or forgotten since the event, sometimes, more than 100 years ago. Some revealing, a few shocking but all fascinating for the family historian or researcher.
The best way to see the past is to look inside the news. I can search British local, national and international news items published in UK national, regional and local newspapers between the 1750′s to the middle 20th century.
I am a passionate historian and I adore historic research. I love the race to find the accurate solution to the unanswered. To be the originator of a truth that has been buried by time is quite thrilling.
As an individual (and not a glossy, flashy research search company) I can offer a personal service and I don’t cost the earth in the process. Usually I just cover my own costs and the time – it’s the searching and researching I really enjoy, there’s nothing like it!
I’ve been involved in several fascinating projects, most famously my extensive and in-depth investigation into the world famous story of The Man They Could Not Hang. A lot of this research is based on old news archive. The work and research was first exposed on my website in 1999 (see here) and published in 2005 by Sutton in hardback after co-authoring a
major work on the life of John Lee. I’m currently writing a screenplay which I hope will eventually transfer into development and maybe beyond.
Sometimes the smallest news snippet can go on to create a huge search to try and unravel the facts and the story behind the story. A real little gem is ‘The Tale of the Missing Trowel’ (see here). This seemingly trivial story and my research of a commemorative missing Victorian trowel has created renewed fascination in the Devon media in the 2000′s!
Newspaper archive is the richest resource for historians. Through editorial written at the time you get a real feeling of the event. Sometimes a feeling of the drama as it was written and read all this years ago. Sometimes searching for the fact is extremely time consuming and expensive. For many (especially those living outside Great Britain) its ‘mission impossible’.
I hope I can help you find those missing news items, so you can thrill to read!
Ian Waugh
Important: In order to participate in services available from Old British News apart from an email account, you need a PDF reader and a PayPal secure payment account or a method to pay using PayPal. I recommend the free Adobe PDF reader available to download here (other readers are available). The link to PayPal is here.