The revolution in Irish newspaper research
For a long time, the advice to anyone who wanted to use newspapers for genealogical research was simple: don't. Without a historically prominent ancestor, the likelihood of finding something useful was infinitesimal, but the investment of time was huge. Inevitably, whether you look at Faulkner's Dublin Journal for 1740 or The Evening Press of 1940, you just end up reading the paper. Very enjoyable, but not the most productive use of research time.
Digitisation completely changed that balance. If you can trawl 100 years of papers in five seconds, why not? An example: The Irish Times of January 5th, 1880, has a report of a court case in Ballinasloe at the height of the Land War. There, listed among the 27 small tenants charged with riot for assaulting a bailiff in the course of an attempted eviction, is my great-grandfather and what looks like his entire extended family. I had no idea there was anything like this in our past. It emerged only because the paper was now digitally searchable.
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