N is for Newspapers

This April we are once again blogging along with the A-Z Blogging Challenge. Our team of one-place studiers will be sharing some of the treasures to be found for a one-place study, particularly around the theme of Visualisation, our Shared Endeavour for 2016.

I have two newspaper clippings in my one-place study archives - my very small physical archive, not my larger digital one. They are a photo from 1928 and a letter from 1988. The latter is from a lifelong Wing resident and identifies the individuals of the local football team (including himself) pictured in the former. The best bit is that they were sent to me by a fellow Wing descendant who had no particular use for them.

Now, at some point along the line those newspaper articles will be available to me digitally. Right now they fall in that no-mans land of time between "historic" editions of newspapers that are prime targets for scanning projects and "current" editions of newspapers that appeared in both print and digital form simultaneously, so it might take a while to get there. Of course, once they were in my possession I was able to scan them myself, tweaking settings to get the best photographic result from the original halftone dot printing process used (and even doing some work in Photoshop to eliminate the halftone look), so I do now have a digital version.

But I have the physical clippings, items that someone thought interesting enough to cut out at the time, and important enough to keep for 27 years, transporting to the US somewhere along the way, until finally they found their way to me on the other side of the world. Somehow that makes it just a bit more special than a random article picked up by a scanning project.

I wonder how many other newspaper clippings, significant to the family who kept it and significant also to a one-place studier, might be out there?

Alex Coles