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Jisc digitisation programmes Projects 2006-2009

The Murder of Jean Alexander (Kilmarnock, 1807)

One of the great things about digitising multiple collections is it allows you to build connections between different resources. Here’s a straightforward example

The John Johnson Collection of Electronic Ephemera has a news-sheet (dated 14 Nov 1807) recounting the murder of two women in the town of Kilmarnock, on the west coast of Scotland. It calls this a “shocking murder and robbery” a “deed of darkness“.

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By 19th November 1807, the news had wound its way to London, where it found itself in the Morning Chronicle (part of the British Library newspaper digitisation)

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The editor of Morning Chronicle had probably been sent the Edinburgh news-sheet. Several of the phrases that appear in the earlier news-sheet (e.g “every possible exertion used to discover and apprehend them“) appear almost replicated in the newspaper)

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