Trove Newspapers - a rich source of County Clare material

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murf
Posts: 365
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2009 12:58 am
Location: Qld Australia

Trove Newspapers - a rich source of County Clare material

Post by murf » Fri Jun 12, 2015 2:22 am

Large numbers of people from County Clare emigrated to Australia, especially during the 19th Century. As a result Australian newspapers provide a rich source of material for researchers interested in County Clare, in the form of obituaries and other biographical notices, as well as more general items about Clare and its people.
The Trove site at http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper operated by The National Library of Australia offers digitised and fully searchable copies of a huge, ever-expanding range of Australian newpapers.
Some examples of the material available can be seen in the transcripts donated by Margaret O’Heir at http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... x_news.htm
The Catholic weeklies the Freeman's Journal and the Catholic Press are especially rich in Clare material.
A word of caution though. There is a town called Clare in the Clare Valley region of South Australia, so a search using the word "clare" will turn up lots of SA material, whereas "county clare" will eliminate these.
Each newspaper search is multi-faceted, in that concurrent searches are conducted in other areas, such as books, journals, pictures, diaries, archived web sites etc, and hits in these areas are indicated on the side of the screen, so that one can easily follow the link to a promising lead.
The site also provides a facility to compile your own list of successful searches on, say a person, family or subject. These lists are freely available for other researchers to view.

mgallery
Posts: 201
Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2012 6:27 pm

Re: Trove Newspapers - a rich source of County Clare materia

Post by mgallery » Fri Jun 12, 2015 8:26 am

Both Trove and the similar service Papers past http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast are fantastic resources. Paddy Waldron kindly pointed this out to me and also that the Freemans Journal in Australia reprinted entire articles from the Irish papers. It has been a great help in my research

Can I suggest a few things
Not every article on Clare is going to be found with county Clare in the text. Search by townland or surname with Clare attached eg search lissycasey kenny clare .
If the town or townland is remotely near Ennis or Kilrush or even in the adminstrative district search on that with the surname of the person eg doonbeg kilrush clare keny
Townlands are frequently misspelled if there at all so dont be surprised if you find donbeg...

If you have someones surname search for that with Clare or Ireland or the name of the townland.

1. Tag articles if you find one relevant so that other people can find them, I notice Murf posted an article the other day on Clancys and O'Dwyers of Miltown. I had already tagged this article with tags I thought were relevant. Others might have other tags they would add.
2. Take a minute to correct the text on Trove, its not always correctly read automatically - to do so is a small thank you to the Australians who put it up and will help make it a better resource for other people using it. The captcha is a pain but if you listen to the audio you can usually figure it out.

Margaret

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