Fairfax News Store

When I was in The National Library of Australia earlier this week I consulted The Fairfax News Store which used to be a subscription site where one could search the Fairfax stable of publications and then, for a fee, download those of interest from the list of hits returned. I was surprised to see this notice on the site "Important notice to all NewStore users. The NewsStore service is now free! Please click here for more information.. I didn't follow that link to more information but promised myself that I would check out the site when I returned home.

Search Screen for Fairfax News Store http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/newsSearch.ac?sy=nstore

It is definitely free. I did a search for someone who is near and dear to me and I was rewarded with 14 news articles from a couple of Fairfax papers. Perhaps you, my readers, might have caught on to this but I haven't heard anyone else in genealogy circles mention that this resource was now free. Perhaps I have been living under a rock.

This is a useful site, especially, for tracing current family members but I haven't used it for ages because of the fees. I tried some simple searches for my most common surnames and struck gold. A couple of birth notices from the Sydney Morning Herald gave me the spouse's name of a second cousin, the names of their two children with birthdates and the hospitals in which they were born. A search for another surname gave me 28 results from 5 newspapers for the period 1996-2013.

More specific searches returned some death and funeral notices that gave me names of children and confirmed dates and places of death. This resource can be used to find those notices from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Melbourne Age and other Fairfax papers between 1996 and today that have been indexed on the Ryerson Index.

Were you like me in the dark about this free resource?