The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.4 | March 2025

Local Group Programmes

Meetings Please check the HGS Website for the latest details of where/how the meetings will take place. You can join in with the international or national group meetings by Zoom.

Alton The Alton Group has now closed.

Contact: Email: andover@hgs-online.org.uk

Andover Meetings are normally held on the second Thursday, September to July, commencing 7.30p.m. at The Fairground Hall, Weyhill, Andover SP11 0QN (November) Using newspapers for family research – Denise Bates

Denise presented her talk, from Northampton, using Zoom and we welcomed 35 people online. Although British newspapers can be viewed in person, on microfiche at record offices, it is the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) online that is the most useful resource for genealogists. The BNA can be viewed by subscription and is also part of the FindMyPast collection. Millions of pages have been digitally scanned and indexed making it much easier for us to find articles of interest. Denise recommended having a wide computer screen to view the potentially large images in their original format. Local papers contain the most detail but such stories are not exclusively published where an event had occurred and may also appear in the most unlikely of locations. There are many helpful tools, in the form of filters and searching, to help you find articles which may include news stories, legal notices, land sales and BMDs. In addition to using a person’s name, dates, places and keywords can be incorporated – also exclusion words. You need to be flexible and avoid very general search terms to avoid being overwhelmed by finds - using wildcards characters (like ‘*’) can be helpful. Perhaps include a title e.g. Rev, Major, Dr and consider alternative or phonetic spellings, nicknames and initials. You may need to draw on other collaborative evidence to support the hope that a find relates to an ancestor because it might be about a distant cousin – or a complete stranger! You should be prepared for what you might find. Some stories (about murders and beatings)

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