THOUSANDS of pages from the defunct Wodonga and Towong Sentinel newspaper have been placed online for the benefit of historical researchers, school students and people tracing their family trees or relatives’ war records.
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The National Library of Australia has made available digitised images of the newspaper from its establishment in 1885 to 1954.
Although the weekly paper was published until 1968, when The Border Morning Mail Pty Ltd closed it, copyright issues have prevented the digitisation program going beyond 1954.
The Sentinel was owned, managed and edited by James Ryan until he was killed by a train at Wodonga station in 1912, and then by his son Charlie until his death in 1965.
No other old Albury or Wodonga newspaper has yet been digitised under the library’s program, but all will be in time.
Benalla’s North-East Ensign (1885-1954) is the only other in the North East to be available on the library’s free online Trove function.
The region’s first published newspaper was The Ovens and Murray Advertiser, first published in 1854 and still operating, followed quickly by The Border Post, published in Albury in 1856.
Many news items that appeared in The Border Post and later The Border Mail were repeated in daily newspapers around Australia through news agencies using telegrams.
In this way, James Ryan’s death in 1912 was widely reported from Perth to Brisbane.
Although the National Library’s priority was to digitise four million newspaper pages over four years starting in 2007, the stated aim of covering every Australian newspaper might take another decade.
Priority was given to digitising one metropolitan paper in each state.
But the weekly papers such as the Sentinel are often more valuable for family historians because they contain lengthy obituaries, marriage reports and other stories of individuals.
Because the National Library’s own collection of original newspapers is limited, it has appealed to libraries, historical societies and other organisations to contribute newspaper content through microfilms.
The library says its Trove newspaper service already carries 40 million articles from over 100 newspaper titles.