I’ve been delighted to find that my local city library has a fully text-searchable archive of British newspapers dating from about 1650 to 1900. As all my ancestors that I’ve currently researched came from England and Scotland, this is a fantastic resource for me because I only have the barest details for most of them from birth and marriage certificates plus census records. I’d be concentrating firstly on mid- to the late 19th century.
Unfortunately I’m lacking in both time and ideas of how best to use this resource to flesh out the people in my family tree. What sort of stories or records have people found useful in their family history research? Anyone know any other good text-searchable resources for Britain (via Google-books) or methods that have proved successful?