Old Newspapers

As those of you who stop by here on a regular basis will know, I’m interested (obsessed?) in finding out the history of my Group. When you’ve got over 100 years to go at there is a lot interesting stuff out there!

A really good source of information is the local newspaper. However, normally to search the old newspapers you have to look at each page which has been transferred onto microfilm and they are searched using the ‘Mark One Eyeball’.

However, I found out today that there are a few of our local paper which are online and searchable. There are newspapers from 1875 (interesting but pretty useless in this context), 1915 & 1925. So I did some searching and only came up with a couple of bits of info, but they are very interesting.

First is from 19th August 1925. The article describes the Troop’s recent summer camp –

Camp 1925-08-19 (Large) 

Click on the cutting to read it

The quality isn’t great and does take some reading, but it is most interesting.

The other one I found was from Saturday June 12th 1915. During the Great War every time a local man was killed or injured, a piece about him would be put in the paper along with a photograph. I found one of our Scouts, Pte. Tom Lewis of the 1st / 5th Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment. See our Remembrance pages for more details about him. So not only do we now have some more information on him and his family, but also a photo (I haven’t had chance to edit the page yet so it can be put here).

When I get the time, I will go and look up the others and add them all to the history and remembrance pages.

All this proves that there is a wealth of information out there, you just have to hunt it down!