The Fort Beaufort Advocate and General Advertiser 1859-1874

The Fort Beaufort Advocate and General Advertiser, first published on 23 July 1859, was a weekly publication produced on Saturdays.

Nadine Van der Merwe realised the potential interest of this publication for genealogists, especially in the run up to the bicentennial of the 1820 settlers, and began to take pictures in her local library with a view to transcribing them. She then realised what a large project this was, and also that many issues were missing, so she approached eGGSA for help. The eGGSA management committee agreed to buy digital scans of the newspaper covering the period 1859-1874 from the SA National Library, and these are now being transcribed by Nadine Van der Merwe and Lorraine Beechey. Sue Mackay started adding them to the eGGSA website on 1 March, and these can now be seen in the eGGSA Newspaper Extracts section.

Because the entire paper has been scanned, the transcribers were not under the same time constraints that I was when photographing extracts from the Grahamstown Journal and other 19th century newspapers in London with a digital camera, when I could really only focus on BMDs. These new transcriptions contain all sorts of interesting snippets, advertisements, shipping news and sometimes the downright bizarre! Many of the 1820 settlers moved into the Fort Beaufort area, so in this bicentennial year we should be especially grateful to Nadine and to eGGSA for making this project possible.