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.
Free access to Findmypast newspaper archive until 16th February
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.
Explore the newspaper archive today at www.findmypast.co.uk
