Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is the subject of today’s Follow Friday post. The project is a partnership between the Library of Congress and NEH with two objectives:
- provide access to a Newspaper Directory covering U.S. papers published between 1690 – present, and
- make selected U.S. newspapers from 1860-1922 available in full-text, searchable digital surrogates.
For more Sassy Jane posts on finding and using historic newspapers, click here.
Chronicling America features free access to newspapers from 1860 to 1922 from the following states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
I can’t imagine the level of professional know-how, information technology skills, and just plain hard work it takes to digitize 2.3 million newspaper pages and create intellectual access to them either by browsing or searching. And for free! I’ve worked on some digitizing projects in archives, but nothing on this epic scale.
See all available digitized newspapers here.
Search the Newspaper Directory for all known titles, span dates, and repositories here.
I was searching last night when I found this:
Chicago Eagle. (Chicago, Ill.) October 17, 1896
If you have Chicago ancestors who made their “fortune from pork sausage,” you’d better check some of those family heirlooms!
My hometown paper still does some of that – who had a bridge party and whose Aunt Tillie was visiting for two weeks from Kokomo.
I’ve had terrible luck with NewspaperArchive.com, though. But Proquest Obituaries is divine.
Check local libraries for online newspaper archives, too. The library in the area of PA where most of my ancestors are from has free access to local papers through newspaperarchive.com. By searching my surname I found many articles where my siblings and I were listed for school, church and 4-H events, many of which I had forgotten. Then I found the social columns where “Mr. & Mrs. Soandso [my parents] and children of Xtown motored to Yville on Sunday to visit [my grandparents]”. Those are the most fun!
Isn’t it? It’s dangerous too – I start reading ads and articles instead of looking for my obits!
I LOVE Chronicling America! I found dozens of articles about the St. Paul, MN line of my family. Great resource!
Very nicely done. My local history library days were well before blogging, so that is a great outreach method you have there.
Your blog is terrific! Here is the url to the blog of the Sandusky History site, if you would like to take a look:
http://sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com