In my Quest for an Obituary from the London Times...

My father-in-law Robert turns 89-years-young next month, and as each new year arrives he seems to slip just a bit further into the past. His interest in his roots is thus stronger now than it has ever been, so I've renewed my quest to locate living cousins of his in England with whom he might be able to correspond. His grandparents (George & Rosina Powell) came to Texas back in the 1800s, while most of the other branches of the family remained in England. Robert has often wondered what became of those relatives "across the pond."

Recently, I found mention of the obituary of Robert's first cousin, once removed in a database of London Times, Deaths, 1982-1988 at Ancestry.com. Marjorie Agnes Scott Trinder (nee Blake) died in the London borough of Richmond Upon Thames in 1986, so I thought that her obituary might provide names of some living descendants or other relatives. The brief entry on Ancestry.com offered nothing other than her date of death, husband's name, and the date of publication, so it would be necessary to locate the actual obituary notice.

I began with the London Times Digital Archive through my subscription to Godfrey Scholars, but it only runs through 1985. I then tried the TimesOnline Web site and learned that they have an online archive that covers the period from the present back to 1985. Great, I thought!

Turned out to be not so great, as the online archive apparently offers primarily newspapers from 2005 to the present. There is one article in their database from 2003, but the rest appear to be from 2005 on. So much for "an entire library of articles dating back to 1985." I can only hope that they are coming soon.

I next headed to the London Mailing List at RootsWeb to see if I might find any insight there into how to access an obituary from the London Times online. The Rootsweb mailing lists are an excellent way to keep up with new databases and find answers to questions you might have about research in a specific area. There I was excited to learn (through an old posting in the archives) that the Bedfordshire Libraries offers a free online membership to its library, and includes the London Times among its databases - both the Digital Archive from 1785-1985, and the current articles through InfoTrac Custom Newspapers dating from 1985 to the present.

Wow! My first question was whether they really allowed online members from outside the area (they do, according to this post), but it is important to remember that if you can access these databases through your own local library or through some other resource, that would be the ideal option. I already have access to the London Times Digital Archive through Godfrey Scholars, but it was very nice to be able to have access to the database of more current UK newspaper editions through the Bedfordshire Library.

The only downer to this great discovery was that I was still not able to locate the obituary. Perhaps it was indexed incorrectly in the Ancestry.com database. Perhaps it is indexed incorrectly in the InfoTrac database. Perhaps it was only a tiny mention and not included in the full text articles database, although I believe the Times (London) coverage is "cover to cover" from July 1985 on. Whatever the reason, it was great to learn about another new (at least for me) resource for English genealogy. My search continues...