I started indexing because it took me six months of trawling through newspapers to find one add for an ancestor’s business. I found most of the indexes to newspapers were piece meal, in that they indexed articles, or BDM notices, or passenger lists but not everything in the paper. So I start at the top of the first column and just go through the whole lot with everything named, entered in the index. Including advertisements and notices of all sorts.

The database is at just over 78,000 extracts at the moment, and that has taken us three years to do, so with a bit more help it should rapidly increase. Well, rapidly for manual extraction. I now have two wonderful volunteers, who have helped me advance the database at a much faster rate. All work of the volunteers is freely available here in the searchable index. At the moment we are trying to stay with mainly Victoria, Australia pre 1900. But if you have an interest in something later, that would be fine.

A lot of the copies of newspapers are not very good. This is generally because the film is not clear or the paper is damaged. Some have faded off to such a degree that you can’t read the whole article or advertisement. I like to note in the comments if the copy is bad, so that people don’t expect a really clear copy when it isn’t.

I up-load to the on-line database from home, so it is a relatively quick process from indexing to getting the information to the public.

Most of the regional papers were four pages, but occasionally had a supplement. The tabloid newspapers are printed off on one A3 sheet per page, the spreadsheets are printed off on two A3 sheets per page.

I have a disclaimer here in case of errors in names or pages etc. Copyright on newspapers is 50 years. I own copyright on the Old News Copy database. I have permission from the Herald Sun Office to reproduce the papers they have copyright over.