Treasure Chest Thursday: George Howard Busby Press Pass

Newspapers are a treasure trove of information. Now that more and more papers are being digitised, access has never been easier.

In Australia, a massive digitising effort has been done by the National Library Trove. Many happy hours have been spent. In New Zealand has PapersPast  also by their National Library and Brightsolid and the British Library are in the process of digitising many UK papers.

I was one of those who had a chance to play with the beta version on the weekend before the official release which will, hopefully, be before the end of the year. I was thrilled to find some snippets of interest. The digitising is quite good although I would like to see about six words before your search term returned in the responses as it would make it easier to determine if the result is one in which you are interested. The beta version did not have save options but I am hoping the full version will have save options of JPG and PDF.  They still don’t have a solution for my One Name Study Quested problem where unfortunately the word re-  quested is returned in the search results.

It is only a small card just less than credit card size but it opened up more possibilities and added another layer to my mystery George’s life. I went back to Trove and did more searching this time for images specifically. George Howard Busby took a number of photographs that were published by the Courier Mail and Queenslander papers in the early 1920s. I still have to do some research to determine if he was actually employed by the paper or was a freelancer.

While none of the photos of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales in the papers at the time were attributed to George, I also have a letter from the Prince’s secretary thanking George for the photos he had sent to the His Royal Highness.

So for me this was double treasure!