The Tablet is a British Catholic weekly journal that has been published continually since 1840. It reports on religion current affairs, politics, social issues, literature and the arts with a special emphasis on Roman Catholicism while remaining ecumenical.
The Tablet archive goes back to 1841 and every page has been scanned and digitised, each article tagged and extracted, so that you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location, and date.
You might not find details of your ancestors, but you will certainly find plenty of information about what was happening at the time, both locally and nationally.
After entering search times the results are presented in the usual way. Clicking on one of the entries will display the OCR text of the article and also gives the page image which can be viewed. This is useful because, as I’m sure you know, OCR is not foolproof.
Alternatively if you are interested in a particular date you can go to Browse All Issues and then keep clicking down until you get to the issue you want.
I couldn’t find any help on the search terms that can be used but my assumption that they are used to find articles that contain all of the terms, appears to be incorrect – I need to do some more work to find out how they work. Some of the articles are quite long and you will probably need to use the search facilities in the browser (CTRL+F) to narrow it down further.
Thanks to Pam Fontana for telling me about this useful archive.