Let’s look at how to searching Chronicling America. This fabulous Historic American Newspapers portal comes to us courtesy of the Library of Congress and NEH.
About Chronicling America
Chronicling America, begun in 2005, “…is an open access database of historic American newspapers created by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), NEH awards enable state partners to choose and digitize newspapers published between 1690 and 1963, representing their historical, cultural, and geographic diversity. Chronicling America currently has over 13 million pages of historic newspapers, with more being added all the time. State partners also contribute essays about each newspaper title’s history.”
Newspapers from all 50 states are now available at Chronicling America.
NDNP began as a “long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.” Institutional participants in the project received grant awards to scan and upload newspapers to this portal.
In September 2022, New Hampshire became the 50th state to join the National Digital Newspaper Program.
Although it’s designed for teachers and students, this guide, “What is Chronicling America?” site,” has a lot to offer genealogists. The site houses introductory videos on using the database, curated links for searching, and an ever-growing guide to individual state newspaper partner’s podcasts, videos, and blogs” that can help extend your family resources to partner libraries and archives.
How to Search Chronicling America
There are several video guides on how to search this newspaper portal.
Staff at NDNP created this guide, Introduction to Chronicling America, at YouTube.
Ken Marks at Ancestor Hunt has also produced video guides to using Chronicling America effectively.
2: “Finding Digitized Newspapers”
3: “Finding Articles”
Using and Searching videos are also available at the NEH portal for the newspaper database.
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