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.