Irish Times: Free access through Dec. 14

To celebrate 150 years of the Irish Times, the paper is offering free access to its archives through December 14.

For more information, visit the paper's site and check out the archive. Choose from text archive for stories from 1996, and the digital archive for everything from 1859 to the present.

Using the term "Jewish," more than 30,000 hits were returned, dating from 1859, when the paper began. Using the term "Jew" returned nearly 48,000 hits.

An interesting item is the date graph. If you are searching for a specific term, you can see - via a sliding bar - the number of stories on that topic in a certain year. Here's the graph using the search term "Jewish":

In March 1859, there were 151 stories with this term; in March 1904, there were 767 stories including the term.

A sampling of stories from 1859-1901 included meetings of societies to convert Jews, what the Passover holiday signifies, start of Rosh Hashana, Disraeli, statistics of Jews in various countries, persecution of Jews in Russia, a new Dublin synagogue, a meeting of anti-Semites in France, the situation of starving Jews in Palestine, riots in Poland, marriages, ads for kosher butchers, immigration of Russian Jews to Africa, funerals, fires in Amsterdam, legal announcements, Zionist Congress opening, and many stories on the 1904 pogroms across Russia.

The search terms are highlighted, making the references easy to find.

On Tuesday, June 28, 1859, this notice appeared on page 4:

On August 9, 1859, on page 4, under Police Intelligence, this was the lead in a story:


And in a story on Italian statistics on May 7, 1859, these interesting figures appear:

This useful resource can offer genealogists much information as to local and international events, family information and much more. You can capture an article as above as a JPG, print it or save as a PDF.

Do take advantage of free access during December.