http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk   Interested to know how useful, members find this archive.  I have used the free paperspast.natlib.govt.nz and trove.nla.gov.au  and have had a much greater success rate. Russell Tuffery Auckland New Zealand 

Russell - I had a look at this archive, and was astonished to hit gold at the first attempt - the Snatt family has a highwayman in its Tree! I discovered that merely from searching on our surname and reading the extracts which appeared - I didn't need to buy any full articles. I think the extracts are intended to be the headlines, which didn't exist in old newspapers, plus the first line of the article, and the scanner often picks up the line just before the beginning of the article instead. So the heading for the entry about the death of Spencer Snatt is an advertisement for cocoa! Another drawback is that the extracts are computer-generated (presumably there's a technical name for it), and the computer seems to makes things up if it can't figure out the actual words, so for example, I got a lot of items covering a mine disaster in Scotland, where it had transcribed 'shaft' as 'snatt'. It looks as if the project is in its infancy at present - only a few newspapers have been transcribed. So, to answer your question - it's undoubtedly useful, but whether it gives value for money will be a matter of personal opinion. Mike Snatt ----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell Tuffery" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2012 1:56 AM Subject: [SFHG] British Newspaper Archive http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk Interested to know how useful, members find this archive. I have used the free paperspast.natlib.govt.nz and trove.nla.gov.au and have had a much greater success rate. Russell Tuffery Auckland New Zealand ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message