Newspaper trawl "complete"

I've now reached the end point of the specific newspaper archive trawl that began in April by searching for all ads by William J Heron. 

After hitting the end of Heron's adverts, and shortly afterwards, his obituary (in 1957)

Well, that's the natural end of that specific archive search pic.twitter.com/qF0GYFVbRZ

— Cian Duffy (@cian_duffy) May 11, 2020

I moved on to the other firm mentioned in my previous post - Archbold, Corry & O'Connor; which I found out to be the continuation of Andrew J Keogh's operations after he died in 1934. Another advertisement from 1934 was by the aforementioned William J Heron pointing out that he had started as a licenced trade specialist by working with Keogh, pitching for his trade now he had passed!

 

Keogh's work goes back to before the time period I cover, and between these three firms - and any other ads that end up being on the same pages - I have added significantly over 100 former pubs to the map.  Keogh operated until 1934, and then Archbold Corry & O'Connor took over until 1974.

Additionally, I have added the street address (where relevant) to all former pubs, which has clarified locations and reduced duplicates. Finally, specific detailed advertisements have allowed me to remove multiple entries that turned out to be off licences or unlicenced hotels that had got on to the map.

Due to the questionable quality of OCR, I'm not sure whether this was any quicker than just going through the papers manually, looking for the commercial property listings. But there's four different relevant papers on the INA, with different publication histories (Irish Independent, Irish Press, Evening Herald, Freemans Journal); and with no fixed day of the week for where the ads get printed. They were traditionally on the rear page, starting in column 1; but that alone doesn't stop there being around 750 issues a year to check.

Most pubs were listed for at least two weeks in at least two of the papers, so the chances of one falling entirely through the cracks is relatively low; but there are entire years where basically nothing turned up. Some are explainable by the domestic economy being extremely poor at the time (1931), and some aren't (1907); but I think there is no more time efficient way to turn up significant volumes of data. And its not likely that I'm ever going to have this more spare time again!