Today, Jan and I received two DVD disks containing many hundreds of issues of the Blyth Standard, our weekly newspaper. These are dated from 1906 to 1980. I just now counted the number of issues, an amazing 1,686 separate issues - ranging from 8 to 12 pages each.
We already had the 1906, 1907, 1925, and 1930 issues, but this new collection will fill up our collection to the end of the life of that publication.
We have already begun to lay plans for getting this "new" information from the past out to the many people who are interested in Blyth. One idea that I am thinking about and plan to pursue is publishing some decade summaries in book form of what happened in the old home town. The first I intend to work on is the 1940s.
The other process that this collection will allow us to do is rapidly search through the old papers for tne occurrences of a particular name. We have many people contacting us and making appointments to visit the colection for family information.This newspaper collection will provide us with another rich area to search for "Smith", "Jones", or "Brockest" in any article of any issue of the paper, select the article, and print it for the guest if it appears to be relevant to their search.
We know that not everyone is as excited as we are about old newspapers, but from a lot of experience we can assert that when we find an item related to the ancestor of those indifferent people, many of them become quite engaged.
We are excited!
Brock Vodden
Blyth, Wednesday March 7, 2012
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