Free Digitized Newspapers -- Four Meta-Sites

There's no such thing as a free lunch, but if you're in the right place there may be such a thing as a free digital old newspaper. I know of four places to look -- "metasites" if you will. They overlap one another a lot, but as of today no one of them has everything.

"All Digitized Newspapers, 1836-1922," in the Library of Congress's  Chronicling America: Historic Newspapers -- something here for three of the five Midwestern states (nothing for Michigan or Wisconsin).

"Historical Newspapers Online," in Penn Libraries Guide -- good coverage of all five Midwestern states, including the lovely site from Quincy Public Library in western Illinois, but they missed the maverick site Old Fulton NY Postcards!

Free Newspaper Archives in the US -- nothing here for Michigan, and they missed one of my Indiana favorites, the Digital Archives of the Allen County Public Library, a go-to place for old news of northeast Indiana and a slice of northwest Ohio.

For international as well as US resources, Wikipedia may be the best of all. Frankly, it's easier for me to check all four than it is to try to figure out which is most complete on any given day.

Elsewhere:

Google News may be becoming an orphan site, not what it used to be, but it's still there.

Of course, patching together all these sites still leaves a lot unsearched and a lot of time consumed. Pay sites Ancestry Historical Newspaper Collection USA, GenealogyBank and Newspaper Archive allow global searching which is sometimes what we need. At least they are affordable to some individuals, unlike ProQuest, for which I have recommended visiting a nearby college or university library.
 


Harold Henderson, "Free Digitized Newspapers -- Four Meta-Sites," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Michigan and Ohio Newspapers

GenealogyBank has just posted significant additional runs of four Midwestern newspapers:

MICHIGAN

Kalamazoo Gazette 1870-1904  (total reported: 1837-1922)

Grand Rapids Press 1901-1922 (total reported: 1893-1922)

Jackson Citizen-Patriot 1866-1922 (total reported: 1859-1922)

OHIO

Columbus Ohio Monitor 1820-1835


Since this blog does not systematically report all such accessions at all the possible sites, consider this as a generic warning that there is more material on line than you thought!



Harold Henderson, "Michigan and Ohio Newspapers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.

Genealogy Bank comes through

I've been pretty hard on GenealogyBank in the past, so it's only fair to make note that today, when I needed information on an obscure hurricane on an island south of Cuba almost a century ago, the New York Times archive failed me, but GB came through with a topical article from New Orleans, background information from Cleveland, and an informative well-cited nugget from the American State Papers. It's not even 11 am and it's already a good day for genealogy!

In this case the technical feature I appreciated most was the ability to search by location, using only keywords, since the particular name was irrelevant at this stage. This ability gives the database microhistorical as well as purely genealogical value (at least as I use those words).

Watchdog Wednesday: GenealogyBank Advertises 35 years of Coverage, Provides 9 -- NOTE CHANGES BELOW

[CORRECTION TO HEADLINE: it wasn't an advertisement, it was a blog post. Precision in all things!]

[NEWS FLASH: The original post has now been changed with excellent added information.]

I love what GenealogyBank does in digitizing old newspapers from all over. I am a subscriber and will continue to be.

I don't love the way they promote it. Yesterday a post on the GenealogyBank blog proclaimed "Chicago Times (Chicago, Illinois) Newspaper Archives (1854-1888)." (BTW, the Chicago Times is a very interesting newspaper historically in addition to its genealogical value as a pre-Fire information source. During the Civil War, it was in many ways a Copperhead paper in Union territory, and was briefly suppressed by an overanxious military officer. Preserving it digitally is especially important because few people today know of it.)

I clicked on the GenealogyBank link to the newspaper and started searching. Many searches came up empty. Then I started conducting searches without specifying any search term except a range of years. With a little clicking I found out that instead of preserving thirty-five years of the Chicago Times, GenealogyBank is (as of the evening of 10 August 2010) in fact preserving, at most, nine.

An honest blog post from GenealogyBank would have announced that they have digitized at least some issues of the Chicago Times for the years 1854, 1855, 1856, 1859, 1864, 1879, 1884, 1885, and 1888. Not "1854-1888." . . . I hope they will soon have many more years posted.