Trying out the Newspapers.com free 7 day trial

American newspaper platform Newspapers.com (www.newspapers.com) is offering a free seven day trial period. You register with a credit or debit card, and at the end of the seven days you can continue with a paid subscription; alternatively, if you cancel once you have signed up, your free trial will continue, but you will have no money debited at the end.

I decided to try to find out more about my grandmother's Currie family (also Curry) from Co. Londonderry in Ireland. Whilst my great grandfather Robert Currie moved to Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1890s, two of his brothers, Arthur and Clark Curry, emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia.Thhere was a story from some csuins who contacte dme a few years ago that Clark ended up dying in a battle during the Prohibition era in Chicago, but a story yet to be verified.

I've been looking into Clark on Newspapers.com, and whilst the 1930s story has yet to be proven, I have discovered one of the most tragic stories form my family past in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1911, Clark's wife Jennie gave birth to a son (to be named Clark). The attending physician at the house realised that she had scarlet fever, and arranged for the area to be quarantined, and for Jennie to be taken to hospital. When the authorities turned up to remove her, Clark refused to let them in - the police were called, and after they broke down the door into his house, Clark attacked them with a meat cleaver, but was soon overcome, arrested and taken to a police station. The arresting officers and Clark were then fumigated, as was the entire station and Clark's house. On the following day, Clark was brought before a magistate, who informed him that his wife had died. Clark was so overcome with emotion that he broke down into tears in front of the magistrate, who in an act of compassion dismissed the case. Just six days later, Clark's baby son also died.

The site was acquired a while back by Ancestry (www.ancestry.com) and is structured differently to the British Newspaper Archive, so it is worth reading the help topics on how best to carry out searches. I've also found that the facility to download pages as PDFs is a little disappointing, with the resolution of the downloaded images quite poor.

Nevertheless the coverage of the material from the USA is quite astonishing, so I will be spending many more hours in the next week before my free trial expires to see what more I can find on my overseas relatives. Overall, a thumbs up for the site.

Chris

You can pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 (out April). Also available, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.