The Bath (England) Chronicle newspaper from between 1770 and 1800 is now available online. It has taken 15 volunteers more than three years to complete the cataloguing work, which is still continuing.
To find out about life in Georgian Bath, you can search the Georgian Newspaper Project database on many subjects, including art, fashion, crime, punishment, pets, and politics. The database contains information from the Bath Chronicle for the years 1770 - 1800. Work on the database is still in progress.
The project is intended to help those with a general or a specialist interest in the people, places, services, and local events of Bath and the surrounding areas in the Georgian period. The project is run entirely by volunteers under the leadership of the editor, Dr. Donald Straughan, also a volunteer.
Bath and North East Somerset Council's archivist, Colin Johnston, described this as a very useful research tool for local historians. "The new database is an invaluable source of information and will make finding articles much easier," he said. "People will be able to type in key search words and then find out exactly which edition of the newspaper they need to look in for the whole article.
You can access the Georgian Newspaper Project if you click here. Click on either "Guided Search" or "Quick Search" to access the information within the database.
This is a very useful resource, not just for Bath but also for people from the surrounding area, including Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. The Bath Chronicle covered all sorts of events over a wide area - crimes, accidents, house and farm sales, etc - and the index includes the names of those involved. It is a valuable source of supplementary information about people's lives, and can add flesh to the ones of your family history. It is also easy and effective to use.
Posted by: Bob Lawrence | February 26, 2006 at 05:26 PM