KM Group newspaper archive

[Joy Dean]

http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/home/2013/march/6/km_group_archive_goes_online.aspx
Thousands of pages from the KM Group's newspaper archive will go online this month - and there will be free access for everyone in the UK.

The family-owned firm is the first regional publisher in the country to digitise volumes of its historic newspapers thanks to a Your Heritage grant and a dedicated group of volunteers.

Tens of thousands of South Eastern Gazette pages, the forerunner of the Kent Messenger, from 1852 to 1912 are being put online as a fully searchable archive.

This covers the greatest period of social and industrial revolution in British history – and an inspiration for the London 2012 opening ceremony.

The archive goes live on Friday, March 22 marked by a launch event at the Historic Dockyard in Chatham attended by 200 Kent schoolchildren and members of local history groups.

[kiterunner]

Ooh, exciting! Thanks for that, Joy!

[Joy Dean]

Ooh, exciting! Thanks for that, Joy!

You're welcome. I could spend hours just browsing happily.:)

[kiterunner]

So here's the link to the search page:
http://www.ukpressonline.co.uk/ukpressonline/?sf=KM

If you register you get an advanced search but then you have to "buy" a year's subscription for the price of £0.00 to view the pages. Don't worry, you don't have to enter any payment details.

I don't know whether I'm doing something wrong, but after magnifying the first page I wanted to view, the resolution seems very low so it's hard to read, and my search phrases aren't highlighted as far as I can see, so I would have to read the whole page to find which is the relevant bit?

Edit - just found the high quality PDF view! Much better quality! But it has automatically searched the page for my search phrase and come up with no matches. :confused: I was only viewing that page because it was in the results list for my search phrase.

[Jill]

Just found my 3x great grandfather on the school board in Ightham, thanks Joy for finding this :)

[Mary from Italy]

How irritating, it isn't free to users outside the UK. Still, I haven't found anyone I was looking for (which isn't really surprising, as the whole extended family I was interested in emigrated in 1857).