Tips for finding when small events happened
Newspapers are a wonderful source of daily events, and relatively obscure events.
Events that were moderately famous for a day and then forgotten may appear in newspapers.
There are a number of newspaper databases available within the Library. Several of these, inlcuding those listed below, are also available offsite to registered Victorian users. For more information also try the research guide How to find items in newspapers.
Content within most online journal databases relates to recent events. Usually this dates from the early 1990s and the rise of the internet.
Some databases do contain more historic material, going back a century or more. They are also available offsite to registered Victorian users.
For more online resources see the Newspapers box above.
Print publications are often very useful for events that occurred before the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s.
Those listed below are chronologies of events, organised in date order, and indexed.
Doing a search of Wikipedia will retrieve more focussed results than a general search engine.
However Wikipedia is often best searched via a search engine such as Google. If you do this include the term wikipedia in your search.
For instance search +"lusitania sinking" +wikipedia.
The + signs mean both terms will be included in the results and the "quotation marks" interpret terms as a phrase.
The results of this search will list this site first.
Wikipedia also has many specific chronologies or timelines.
Try an Internet search engine such as Google.
Do a keyword search using terms relevant to the event you are researching.
This can be a good way to find dates and detail, particularly for recent events.
See Also boxes on this page for internet sites such as Wikipedia; Google News Archive; and World History Database.
