The Teesdale Mercury Newspaper Digitization Project is Now Complete

The Teesdale Mercury is a weekly newspaper sold in Teesdale in County Durham as well as in the towns of Richmond, Darlington and Bishop Auckland. The newspaper was founded in 1854 as the Teesdale Advertiser and Monthly Chronicle in Barnard Castle, where it’s still published. In 2009 it received a National Lottery grant to create a digital archive of the first hundred years of its issues. (from British Newspapers Online)

The digital archive is about to become reality. According to articles found online, the archive was to open online as a digitally archived newspaper avilable on the web on October 24, 2012. Thus far, I haven’t been able to locate it. If a reader has the URL, please add it to the “comments.”

I note that it has a text-searchable database, so finding ancestors should be a snap!

Following is an excerpt from an article published in October 19, 2012 edition of the Teasdale Mercury:

A MILLION MERCURY STORIES LIVE ONLINE
Oct 19, 2012

MORE than a million news items spanning 100 years of the Teesdale Mercury will be available with the click of a mouse from next week.

The Teesdale Mercury Archive Project (TMA) has digitally recorded every available page of the newspaper from its first edition up to 1955.

That means 100 years of news and adverts will available online when the archive website is unveiled and goes live.
The gigantic database will be available free of charge to anyone with internet access.

But the project team is keeping the name of the site a closely-guarded secret until the official launch next week.
More than 5,000 editions of the Mercury were scanned for the project and the website contains around 40,000 pages with more than a million items of news told in countles numbers of words.

It took five years to digitalise all of the pages. It takes seconds for the website search engine to deliver what you are looking for from its text-searchable database.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads-up.

Read the full article.