British Newspaper Archive: A Family History Guide
The British Newspaper Archive (BNA) is the largest online collection of historic British and Irish newspapers. It is run by Findmypast in partnership with the British Library, which supplied most of the digitised pages, and in February 2026 it passed 100 million pages. For family historians it is the quickest way to find the notices, reports and local stories that official records leave out: a wedding write-up, an inquest, a court appearance, an obituary naming every surviving child.
Searching is free on the BNA website. Reading full pages at home normally needs a paid subscription, but the whole archive is free to use in the British Library Reading Rooms and in many UK public libraries. This guide explains what the archive holds, how to search it well, and which other newspaper sources are free.
What the British Newspaper Archive is
The BNA began as a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise the Library’s national newspaper collection. The Library holds more than 60 million issues of UK, Irish and world newspapers, so the digitised part is still a fraction of what exists on paper and microfilm. New titles and years are added every month.
The archive covers national dailies, weeklies, regional and very local papers, specialist titles and some papers published in Ireland and the former colonies. Runs can be long: the Daily Mirror, for example, is available from its first year, 1903, up to 2000. Other titles survive for only a few years. Always check the title list for the town you need before assuming that a missing result means the event was never reported.
In July 2026 the BNA moved to a new website at britishnewspaperarchive.com, with a rebuilt search and tools for saving clippings into collections. Older links to britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk now redirect to the new address.
Free and paid access
There are three ways in, and it pays to start with the free ones.
| Where | What you can do | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| BNA website, free account | Search everything, see text snippets, read pages marked free to view | Free (registration required) |
| BNA website, subscription | Read and download every page | Paid; check the current plans on the BNA site |
| British Library Reading Rooms (London and West Yorkshire) | Read all BNA content on Library computers | Free with a Reader Pass |
| Many UK public libraries | Read BNA content on library computers | Free; find a library with LibraryOn’s map |
| Findmypast | The same newspaper collection within the higher Findmypast plans | Paid; check which plan includes newspapers |
The free-to-view pages come largely from the British Library’s Heritage Made Digital project, which digitised out-of-copyright titles. You still need to register and sign in to read them. For everything else, run your searches free at home, note the exact title, date and page of each promising hit, then read the pages in one session at a library or during a short subscription.
What family historians find in newspapers
Newspapers rarely replace a certificate, but they often explain it. Typical finds include:
- Birth, marriage and death notices. Paid announcements placed by the family, often with addresses, maiden names and the names of parents.
- Wedding reports. Local papers described weddings in detail: the bride’s parents, bridesmaids, best man, guests, gifts and where the couple would live.
- Obituaries and funeral reports. Occupation, clubs, church, war service and lists of mourners, which can identify married daughters and in-laws.
- Inquests. Sudden or accidental deaths were investigated by a coroner and usually reported, sometimes with witness evidence from relatives.
- Court reports. Magistrates’ courts and assizes appear regularly, giving ages, addresses and occupations of the people involved.
- Local news. School prize days, sports teams, shop openings, accidents, fires, council business and letters to the editor.
- Emigration and travel. Farewell events, letters sent home from abroad and advertisements from shipping agents.
- War reports. Casualty lists, local men wounded or missing, photographs of servicemen, gallantry awards and welcome-home events.
Combine these with the civil registers and census. A death notice gives you a date to order from the GRO index; an inquest tells you why a probate record was delayed; a wedding report names the witnesses you saw on a marriage certificate.
How to search the BNA step by step
The text behind each page was produced by optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is not fully accurate: the BNA itself notes that results depend on the condition of the original or microfilm, the paper, the typeface and the column layout. Small print, faded ink and tight columns produce misread words, so a name can be on the page and still not be found. Work in stages.
- Start narrow. Search the surname with a place and a date range of a few years around the event you expect. Use the region and title filters to stay near where the family lived.
- Use phrase search for full names. The phrase option (the same as quotation marks) finds “John Hartley” as a unit rather than every page with both words.
- Try the name the paper would print. Reports often used initials and titles: Mr J. Hartley, Mrs Hartley, Pte. Hartley. Search the surname with the street, village or employer instead of the forename.
- Search spelling variants. Try each version you have seen in other records, and likely OCR confusions such as rn for m, li for h, or e for c.
- Remove words when results dry up. If a precise search fails, drop the forename, widen the dates, then search the place and event (for example an inquest in a named village) without any name.
- Read around the hit. Once you find one report, browse the same paper a week either side. A funeral report often follows a death notice, and court cases can run across several issues.
- Record the citation. Save the title, date, page and column with every clipping so you can find and cite it again.
A short illustrative example
Suppose a death certificate from 1912 gives accidental drowning in a Lancashire town. Searching the surname for that year across Lancashire titles finds nothing. Searching the word inquest with the town name for the month of death finds a report in which the surname has been read by the OCR with one letter wrong. The report names the father, the family’s street and the employer, all leads for the census and parish registers. This example is invented to show the method.
Other newspaper sources, many of them free
Welsh Newspapers (National Library of Wales)
The National Library of Wales offers Welsh Newspapers free online, with over a million pages of out-of-copyright newspapers published in Wales from The Cambrian of 1804 into the early twentieth century, in English and Welsh. For families from Wales, search here before paying for anything.
The Gazette
The Gazette (the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes) is the official public record, free to search at thegazette.co.uk. It is not a newspaper in the usual sense, but it prints notices that matter to family historians: deceased estates, bankruptcies, name changes, military commissions and honours. The National Archives points out that naturalisations were announced in the London Gazette from 1844 to 1980, so it is also a free route to immigrant ancestors.
The Times and other national archives
The Times Digital Archive, published by Gale, is available through many public library services, some of them remotely with your library card number and some only on library computers. Ask your local library which newspaper databases it subscribes to; the answer varies by council.
Local studies libraries and record offices
Many local papers have never been digitised. Local studies libraries and county record offices usually hold runs of their area’s papers on microfilm, and some keep name indexes or cuttings files compiled by staff and volunteers. The British Library catalogue will tell you which titles were published in a town and for which years, even where the only copy is on film.
Polish-born ancestors in British newspapers
British newspapers are a strong source for Polish families in the UK, because English-language local papers reported on Polish soldiers, airmen, refugees and workers in their towns during and after the Second World War. Look for reports of Polish servicemen stationed nearby, weddings between Polish men and local women, accidents, court cases, dances and concerts, and later news from the resettlement camps and hostels where many families lived.
Polish names cause two separate problems. British reporters often misspelt them or wrote them phonetically, and OCR then misreads the misspelling. Diacritics are almost always lost. A surname such as Wiśniewski may appear as Wisniewski, Wisnievski or Visnievski, and many people later used an anglicised surname. Search the first few letters with a place and date, search by camp or unit, and keep a list of every version you meet. Our guide to anglicised Polish surnames shows the common patterns.
A newspaper report rarely gives a birthplace in Poland, but it can give the clues that lead to one: a unit, a camp, a wife’s maiden name, a date of marriage or naturalisation. Use them to find the naturalisation file and service record, then the place of birth, and only then the Polish register. Read about Polish resettlement camps and hostels for the places most often reported. Polish-language newspapers published by the émigré community in Britain are a separate source with their own collections, covered in our guide to Polish newspapers in Britain.
Official sources
- The British Newspaper Archive
- The British Library (Reading Rooms and newspaper collections)
- The National Archives: newspapers research guide
- Welsh Newspapers, National Library of Wales
- The Gazette