Historic newspapers online
African American Genealogy Examiner
As mentioned a few weeks ago when discussing the new Google News Time Line, historic newspapers can provide a wealth of information, both directly and indirectly, about our ancestors. Viewing history when it was still news will reveal contemporary opinions and provide the context surrounding our ancestors’ lives. In addition to this broad use, one can often find birth, marriage, and death notices, as well as other news articles specifically mentioning our ancestors’ activities. Prior to the end of slavery, you will also find, in many newspapers, advertisements for rewards for runaway slaves (see my previous article on these ads). There are several sources for online historical newspapers:
Paid Subscription Sites
Ancestry.com has a great collection of historic newspapers, as part of its U. S. Deluxe Collection subscription service. The specific contents of this collection do change, due to licensing agreements with various individual newspapers, and also provides access to some newspapers through NewspaperARCHIVE.com.
NewspaperARCHIVE.com also has its own site, with exclusive access to some newspapers. This site has a free membership, which allows five page views per day, or a premium subscription membership at the low cost of $17.99 per month for a monthly subscription, or just $9.99 per month for an annual subscription.
My favorite source for online newspapers is GenealogyBank.com, another subscription site. Their content grows each month, and seems to provide the widest variety of newspapers. Furthermore, their search engine is the best, and provides the most accurate results. You can also limit search results to specific states, time periods, and type of article. The monthly subscription price is $19.95, or $69.95 for an annual subscription. The site also offers a special introductory price of $9.99 for the first 30 days.
Free Sites
As part of its endeavor to make its collections available online, the Library of Congress has instituted the “Chronicling America” project. This website provides information about historic newspapers in the Library’s possession, and has begun digitizing and indexing newspapers in several states. Currently, newspapers for the years 1900-1910 are available, and plans exist to continue digitizing newspapers for the entire time period from 1836-1922. Unfortunately, the project is currently behind schedule, but the current offerings still constitute a great resource. This project is also notable for its inclusion of several African-American newspapers, including the District of Columbia’s The Washington Bee and The Colored American.
Also, many newspapers have been indexed, transcribed, and digitized by various local archives, historical, and genealogical societies. If you have the name of a particular newspaper of interest, try searching for the name in Google (or your favorite search engine). If you do not know the name of any newspaper try searching for the name of the town or county/state and "newspapers". You will be pleasantly surprised at what you may find online!
Michael Hait,
African American Genealogy Examiner
Michael Hait is a professional genealogist, specializing in Maryland research, African-American genealogy, and Civil War records. Michael is the creator of THE FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH TOOLKIT CD-ROM, published by Genealogical Publishing Co. in 2008. He currently serves as the instructor of a...
Comments
These are wonderful resources!
--Sharon Jones,Houston Black Culture Traditions Examiner
Great article, Mr. Hait! These are valuable resources for my research as well. There are tons of African-American obituaries from the past contained in the archives at GenealogyBuff.com
Some are in the Library of Files section and some are in the user-contributed forums.
Thank you for this passing on these wonderful resources.
Google News Archive has added more newspapers from the U. S. , Canada, Australia and Malaysia, Brazil in June some of which came form the former pages of record.
The Toledo Blade microfilm archive is online at the Google News Archive.
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