12 December 2014

Findmypast promotes additions to newspaper collection

Featured this week in findmypast's weekly update is:

"Over 800,000 new articles have been added to our collection of British Newspapers. Two new titles have also been added, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, County Chronicle and the Surrey Herald & Weekly Advertiser for Kent.  Substantial updates to existing titles include over 112,000 additional articles from the Sheffield Independent and over 110,000 additional articles from the Western Daily Press. The full collection now stands at over 100 million articles."
This is the first time I've seen number of articles used as a measure. 100 million sounds big. It corresponds to 9,367,155 pages, about 10 articles per page. That's still impressive, but why do they have to use the old trick of expressing things in smaller units to make the numbers bigger? We see this all the time when oil spill volume is expressed in tons by the company and litres by environmental groups, in tons the number is 1136 times smaller.

The addition of the Aberdeen Weekly Journal for 1915 - 1919, 1939 - 1945, which includes a time when my ancestor was there, is impressive enough for me!

AND

Other additions to Findmypast this week are, sourced from FamilySearch, over 31 million English Marriages, 1538-1973 and over 130,000 Welsh Marriages, 1541-1900. Also over 700,000 new Irish Petty Sessions Court Registers, completing the collection, sourced from the National Archives of Ireland.

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