350 years of The London Gazette

This month sees the 350th anniversary of the London Gazette, initially published as the Oxford Gazette, and forerunner to its UK and Irish equivalents the Edinburgh Gazette, the Dublin Gazette (now Iris Ofigiuil) and the Belfast Gazette.

The Gazettes are the official paper of the state, essentially, and record a remarkable amount of useful information for family history research - notices of businesses, bankruptcies, military honours and promotions, civil awards, planning permissions, and much more. 350 years of publication is certainly worth celebrating!

The Gazette website has a dedicated section looking back at the title, available at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/history/350-years. As part of the celebrations, the site has uploaded a short animated video at https://youtu.be/JqK2Lx6mryI, presented below for convenience:

To freely search the Gazettes, visit www.gazette.co.uk.

Note that the Belfast Gazette replaced the all Ireland Dublin Gazette as a new title for Northern Ireland from 1921. I recently discovered that 50 years worth of the Dublin Gazette have also been digitised for the late 18th century - for more on this, see my blog post from August at http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-dublin-gazette-from-1750-1800-is.html.

Congratulations to the London Gazette - and onwards and upwards for another 350 years!

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. My Pinterest account is at https://www.pinterest.com/chrismpaton/.