The Courier’s vast archive records life in Scotland and a Scottish perspective on the world across five centuries.
This newspaper and its predecessor publications have been publishing since the 1700s.
Our archive details the mundane and the magnificent, from the petty crime that bred in Scotland’s chocking streets as the industrial revolution began to stir, to the mobilization for world wars and the crumbling of the British Empire.
Our photographic records stretch back into the half-forgotten depths of the early part of last century to when chimneys dwarfed our towns, smoke obscured the sun and agricultural mechanisation was in its infancy.
But what brings our archive to life for 21st century readers is the indexing tool employed by the generations of journalists who went before us.
They used a system called Doomsday Book. These were thick, leather-bound ledgers, one representing each year until 1969, when they were phased out.
This system was simple but effective. News events were categorised alphabetically council matters, crime, industry, shipping movements and so on and allocated a page. Each day a journalist would mark up the day’s events under the various headings.
The result is that if we now wish to research crime in 1850, we can turn to the crime page in that year’s Doomsday Book to see a list of the dates and nature of the crimes we reported throughout that year and the page number on which they appeared.
The alternative for any researcher would be to trawl through bound files of newspapers in the hope of chancing across an item of interest.
In this blog I’ll be mining the Doomsday Book and archives to unearth unusual events or images.