Thread: Researching old WW Machinery

The search capability of Trove is pretty sophisticated without needing Google.
You can filter results by State, newspaper, decade, ads/articles, with/without photos.
There are also other publications like photos, books and articles.
Home - Trove
Lots of interesting stuff there. We recently found a letter to the editor on Trove written by my Grandmother as a 9 year old.

Peter

he trove archives are great. A few glitches with character recognition of the scans, and it can be a bit tough to find the text on the page. But an excellent resource none the less.

John

Peter,

Great idea for a thread, research can be tedious, and it's good to learn more tricks.

With Trove, one thing that took me a bit was finding the piece of text in the newspaper page (as sometimes it is hard to find if it doesn't just highlight that section). Once I have the page up, I click ctrl F and type the search txt in. Once it finds the txt on the left side (the txt recognition side), I then double click on the txt recognition txt and the window will adjust so that text is in the top left of the page (this is handy when zooming in).

Another thing I use a lot is when googling, click on the images tab, this shows the images associated with the search.

Lastly, mixing up the words, just a small change in your wording can give vastly different results, in Google and Trove.

I hope the suggestions keep comming, I can use all the help I can get with researching.

Cheers,

Camo

I'm new to the Trove Newspaper search but as stated here, I can see some useful information yielded from old news papers, information such as company addresses, dates that a company was trading or closing, types of machinery produced etc..
For me I have always gone by Manufactures or Merchants catalogues as a great resource, take the McPherson's catalog's for instance, complete with pictures and descriptions, these catalogues are useful for identifying a machine, closely dating a machine, size and capacity of a machine, even down to the RPM a machine should run.
McPhreson's catalog's are pretty common, an ebay search usually turns up quite a few.
Manufactures catalogues on the other hand are not common, the reason for this is most were, for the later part of the century pamphlet based information, single information sheets on individual machines given out by a manufacture or sometimes in a bound and riveted folder.
Because manufactures advertised their goods using this type of ephemera, and not in a bound book as such, people were less likely to keep this material, and especially as new and updated machines were coming on to the market all the time, the information quickly dated.
Its only now that we are realizing how important this type of information is to people who wish to restore old woodworking machinery.


Melbourne Matty.