Wednesday 19 August 2015

The Dublin Gazette from 1750-1800 is online

I've just made a discovery concerning the Dublin Gazette, the official newspaper of record in Ireland prior to January 1922, which I was not previously aware of. Until now I was aware that some editions of the newspaper were available online via the British Library's 1700-1800 Burney Collection, sourced mainly from 1708-1712, 1724-1725 and 1797, whilst 47 issues between 1707 and 1909 are available via the subscription based Newspaper Archive (http://newspaperarchive.com).


I'm giving a talk on newspapers this coming Saturday at the Lanarkshire Family History Show in Motherwell (see http://lfhsshow.weebly.com), and whilst updating the Powerpoint for my talk I decided to have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for the title at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dublin_Gazette. Imagine my surprise when this appeared at the bottom of the entry:


Fifty years worth of Dublin Gazettes, from the 1750s to 1800 are linked to from the site, with the originals hosted at the Oireachtas library website at http://opac.oireachtas.ie. The Houses of the Oireachtas contain the two institutions of the Republic's national parliament, Dáil Éireann (the House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (the Senate).

The editions are those held by the Oireachtas in bound volumes, which have been digitised into hefty sized PDF files of about 1GB each. I've just downloaded the file from 1800, and it was 1.1GB and took about 25 minutes to download - thank God I upgraded to a new computer last weekend, as I don't think my previous one would have liked it! Nevertheless the quality is superb, and the good news is that the newspapers are keyword searchable, the editions having been OCRed.

It may take a while for me to download these, but I suspect they are going to prove to be useful!

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including my recently released Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.

1 comment:

  1. What would be great now would be the Dublin Gazettes from the 19th and into the early 20th century before partition. There will be a wealth of data in there just when most of us begin to be able to trace our Irish family.

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