by Michael W. Dindinger, via email on September 17, 2019
FAMILY HISTORY LEARNING MOMENT
Michael's main sources for this post:
The Family History Guide
FamilySearch Research Wiki
Since digitizing and storing thousands of images of newspaper pages on the Web is expensive, free online collectons of digitized historical newspapers are rare. However, modern day newspapers are increasingly found for free online. Free access to “historical’ databases can often be found at local libraries in larger communities.
Michael's main sources for this post:
The Family History Guide
FamilySearch Research Wiki
Since digitizing and storing thousands of images of newspaper pages on the Web is expensive, free online collectons of digitized historical newspapers are rare. However, modern day newspapers are increasingly found for free online. Free access to “historical’ databases can often be found at local libraries in larger communities.
See also ‘Ancestors Season 2: Newspapers as Records’ in the
FamilySearch Learning Center. You might also want to take a look at an update to this post; principally drawn from James Tanner's Genealogy's Star. The update is here.
Historical
Newspapers
Free
·
Library of Congress - Chronicling America -Historic American Newspapers (free)
·
TheAncestor Hunt Links to free sites
·
TheAncestor Hunt Links to Historical American Farming Newspapers Online
·
GoogleNews Archive (free)
·
Elephind.com Search engine
that links to websites containing newspapers
·
Online HistoricalNewspapers Website (lists of both free and $)
·
Wikipedia (lists both free
and $)
·
US HistoricalNewspapers and Obituaries at Latter-day Saint Compiled Genealogies (lists of both
free and $)
·
Digital Historical Newspapers (wiki page to free online
newspapers)
Subscription
·
genealogybank.com ($)
·
NewspaperArchive.com ($) - available for free to TRL card holders or in a TRL Libaray
·
Newspapers.com ($)
·
Ancestry.com ($
·
Online HistoricalNewspapers Website (lists of both free and $)
·
US HistoricalNewspapers and Obituaries at Latter-day Saint Compiled Genealogies (lists of both
free and $)
Current newspapers - see also Libary List here
·
RootsWebObituary Daily Times (free) has a searchable database of over 14 million
modern-day obituaries extracted by volunteers. Most are from 2000
or later, but some date back to the 1980s.
·
ABYZ Newslinks (free) has a
directory of links to newspapers online organized by state and city.
·
OnlineNewspapers.com (free) links to
United States newspapers online.
·
SHG Resources StateHandbook and Guide (free) links to current U.S. newspapers online.
·
WorldVitalRecords.com has an extensive
collection of online newspapers.
·
World-Newspapers.com - list of
newspapers from all over the world.
Why
Use Newspapers?
Newspapers may focus on a small community or the world, a nation, or a state. They may serve a general audience or a particular ethnic, religious, racial, or political group.
- Newspapers report family information within notices of births, marriages, and deaths (obituaries), and local news.
- Newspapers usually began before government birth, marriage, and death records, often published soon after the initial settlement of a locality.
- Newspapers may serve as a substitute for civil records that were destroyed.
- Unlike most government records, newspaper articles are not limited to a form. Thus, newspapers may contain details not found in more structured records.
- Newspapers can report marriages, deaths or accomplishments of people who no longer live in the area but who still have friends or family there.
- Graphic for this bullet not available
- Newspapers may report events in the life of local inhabitants even when these events occurred elsewhere.
- Birth announcements may contain the infant's name, birth date, and parents' names, as well as the religion of the family.
- Wedding announcements may contain the wedding date and place; the names of the bride, groom, bride's parents, and groom's parents; and the religion of the family.
- Death notices and obituaries may contain the name and place of residence of close family and friends of the decedent, as well as the decedent's death date and place, birth date and place, and biographical information, such as occupation, military service, religion, schools attended, parents' names, places of residence over time, and place of origin.
- News stories, legal notices, local personal columns and advertisements may contain nearly any information imaginable, including political or criminal activity, legal and domestic disputes, real estate transactions, business information, social contacts, military service, missing persons (including runaway slaves), or information about local disasters, epidemics, or other community milestones which affected the local population. Early local columns are more like local gossip but contain rich family information.
HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY
SEARCH FOR NEWSPAPERS
There
are 13 online lessons given at The Ancestor Hunt Blog
to help you find and search for your ancestors in newspapers:
More tips
·
You may find it helpful to place a notice in a local newspaper
in order to contact others who may have information about your family.
·
Search all newspapers for your ancestor's area, particularly
those focusing on your ancestor's ethnicity. Ethnic papers "care"
about ancestors that mainstream papers ignore.
·
Don't ignore an ethnic newspaper that was published far from
your ancestor, even hundreds of miles away. These papers often have a
widely-circulated readership, so they tend to focus on a much wider area. For
example, articles about ancestors from Illinois, Kansas, and Nebraska can be
found in an ethnic newspaper published in Iowa.
·
To research historical newspapers and be successful, it helps to
be educated about the characteristics of these important genealogy resources;
where to find them, and how to best search for the articles that you are
seeking.These Lessons will go a long
way to improving your research skills:
TIME PERIOD
Newspaper-like
publications in the United States began shortly after the arrival of the first
colonists in the 1600s, but the first continuously published newspaper in
British North America is considered to be the Boston News-Letter, first
published on April 24, 1704.
Milestone
in newspaper content: the mid-1800s
Early
American newspapers were generally only a few pages and focused on
international rather than local events. However, the combination of the
telegraph, the railroad, the power printing press, and public hunger for news
during the Civil War changed American newspapers permanently during the
mid-1800s. They increased the news gathering, production, and distribution
capacity of big-city papers such that these papers took over the reporting of
international, national, and state news. This changed the focus of small-town
papers to local events and ordinary people.
Identifying and
finding newspapers in an area
Internet
·
1690-present: The Library of Congress' Website Chronicling America:Historic American Newspapers contains information about America's newspapers from 1690 to the
present, including the locality each paper covered, its title, publication
years, and current locations in various repositories. The database is
searchable by place or title. After using this source to identify newspapers in
your ancestor's locality, we recommend you use both this site's listing of
repositories as well as OCLC/WorldCat to find
repositories in your area that have the newspapers in question. Chronicling
America also contains a growing collection of digitized newspapers
published between 1836 and 1922, and is planned to become a comprehensive
source for digitized U.S. newspapers from that time period.
·
1700-present: The United StatesNewspaper Program was a cooperative national effort among the states and the
federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers
published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.
Funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Technical
assistance was furnished by the Library of Congress. The program inventoried
holdings in public libraries, county courthouses, newspaper offices, historical
museums, college and university libraries, archives, and historical societies.
Newspapers were entered into OCLC/WorldCat.
·
Toms, Gary. NewspaperResearch. (25 minute online video) FamilySearchResearch Classes OnlineMid-Continent Public
Library, Midwest Genealogy Center, 2010.
·
United
States Newspaper Program lists newspapers in each
state that
have been digitized through support from endowments from the National Endowment
for the Humanities.
·
The Olden Times
website partially
indexes newspaper announcements of selected hotel guest registers. Very
limited.
·
ViewShare
historical Newspapers online This provides helpful links to a variety of databases
housing individual papers, and searchable database by U.S. state, newspaper,
On-site library collections
On-site library collections
University libraries, state libraries, state archives, and historical and genealogical society libraries generally have strong newspaper collections for a given state. Local libraries often have a good collection for the immediate area.
How to Obtain United States Newspapers
Listed
below are resources for finding newspapers generally in the United States.
However, many excellent statewide resources exist for finding newspapers of a
state or county.
·
Books
In
addition to this page, please see the state newspaper pages and the county
pages on this wiki.
Newspapers in the States
Territories and Federal District
