FOLLOWING HISTORY THROUGH PAST NEWSPAPERS. MIKE PETTY

We all read our daily newspapers to keep up to date with current affairs, sport, to study our stocks & shares, to read our star signs & much more.
Mike Petty our speaker has long been involved in the study of the Cambridgeshire newspapers & writes columns for such newspapers as the Cambridge weekly news & has his own web site. At our July meeting he took us back to the origins of all newspapers in Cambridgeshire which gave us much more local news. He read off lists of Newspaper titles that have come & gone over the years from 1762 & told where we can find copies in various forms.
Originally news papers or hard copies were searched but progress has taken us to reading them on micro film & fiche.
The major source of availability of these papers are found in the series of the Newsplan report published by the British Library Newspaper library & are available on line.
Newsplan volumes are arranged by county & then by title.
Cambridge University Library holds a wide range of papers from local to international editions, & the Cambridgeshire Collection in the Lion Yard Library in Cambridge have been involved in the Newsplan & have now microfilms of virtually all the Cambridgeshire newspapers.
Mike told us that ‘what is news today is history tomorrow’. The first indexing of newspapers in 1850 took the form of cuttings taken from papers & filed in Cambridge under 750 different topics. The cuttings saved time as a person did not have to trawl through a whole newspaper if he wished to look at something significant.
Locally village news was eventually hand written onto index cards & can be found in local libraries. There is a good example of these in the Wisbech Library – each card filed under the village name. There are also, in the Wisbech library, a good collection of film, covering the Star of the East, segments of which appear monthly in our Journal & the Wisbech Standard which also has a card index of news from our villages from 1888-1926.
A fascinating talk which we hope will help our readers with their family & social history research.
Our next event is our Annual Family History Day on September 22nd in St. Peter’s Hall in Wisbech from 10am with lots of help from specialists, visiting family history societies & our own members.
Our AGM is on September 27th.
[Barbara Holmes]