The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) will be reaching 100 million pages of content this week (it's currently at 99,924,013 pages). The same content is also made available to view via a FindmyPast subscription, and as such, FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) is opening up its access to the collection for free until February 16th to celebrate. The following is its announcement:
Findmypast opens newspaper archive for free to celebrate 100-million-page milestone
- Findmypast and the British Newspaper Archive reach 100 million historical newspaper pages digitised and published online to the public
- The collection dates back to 1699, covering over 2,700 titles and more than 7 million issues, offering a vast, powerful resource for uncovering vibrant family stories
- Findmypast’s high quality digitisation process and powerful search tools mean it's easier than ever to make discoveries, add them to family trees, or save them to Workspace projects
- To celebrate, Findmypast is offering free access to the entire newspaper archive until 16 February 2026, giving family historians a full week to explore
Findmypast, the home of British and Irish family history, is celebrating a monumental milestone this week: its ever‑growing digital historical newspaper collection reaches 100 million fully searchable pages, opening up countless new opportunities for family historians to uncover hidden stories, forgotten moments, and long‑lost ancestors.
This milestone marks one of the world’s largest long-running digitisation projects to enable broader access to these significant historical records. To celebrate the occasion, Findmypast is offering free access to its entire newspaper archive until 16 February 2026, giving researchers a full week to dive into centuries of headlines and discover the unexpected.
Spanning 400 years and featuring more than 2,700 titles and 7 million issues, Findmypast’s newspaper archive is one of the richest sources for building a vivid picture of your ancestors’ lives. Whether you're chasing down a great‑grandfather’s wartime escapades, tracking a long‑forgotten marriage announcement, or stumbling across a scandal that reshapes your family narrative, these pages offer a window into events as they happened.
Findmypast’s newspaper search tools are designed to help family historians uncover stories quickly and accurately. Researchers can draw on extracted details from birth, marriage, and death notices—instantly linkable to family trees—and refine broad searches with smart filtering to pinpoint the most relevant results. Clip and save articles to your tree, add them to your Workspace, or create a Collection around a family member or project.
The vast, continually growing archive includes newspapers from the UK, Ireland and beyond, digitised page-by-page on an ongoing basis by a team based in Boston Spa, Yorkshire.
Using the latest equipment, the pages are scanned to a high resolution, and the images processed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This extracts the text data, enabling Findmypast’s own machine learning technology to identify key terms powering a more detailed search, including information like names, dates, locations, and even phrases. Quality checks ensure that the pages are clean and readable before they are processed and added to the archive.
Lee Wilkinson, Managing Director of DC Thomson History, which owns Findmypast, said: “Reaching 100 million published newspaper pages is a landmark moment for Findmypast, and a powerful reflection of what long-term partnership can achieve. Over 15 years, we have worked closely with major British & Irish archives, cultural organisations, and publishers to preserve these fragile records and expand public access to them. Each page adds depth to our shared history and gives researchers, educators, local historians and families new ways to understand the lives and communities that came before us. I’d encourage everyone to go online and explore this rich resource for free.”
Delve deeper into your family history at www.findmypast.co.uk
(With thanks to Madeleine Gilbert)
Chris
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