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.]

Chronicling America, but not much of the Midwest

The Library of Congress's admirable Chronicling America, covering various years between 1860 and 1922, has so far put up on line pages of 14 Ohio newspapers, 1 Chicago political weekly, and nothing from Wisconsin, Indiana, or Michigan. Check out the full list for your own favorite states. And yes, what's up is searchable!

Illinois State Info from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress Digital Reference Section has produced an Illinois State Guide to digital resources on the LOC site. It comes in four parts: under "American Memory," 23 collections to search with samples of what's in them pulled out; 9 "Related Resources"; 8 "External Links"; and a brief, quirky "Selected Bibliography" that manages to omit Robert Howard's pedestrian but standard Illinois: A History of the Prairie State, Donald Miller's brilliant City of the Century, and William Cronon's modern-day classic Nature's Metropolis. If you don't find something to make your heart beat faster and distract you from what you should be doing, you may not actually have Illinois research targets, you may only think you do!

No other midwestern state has such a detailed guide, but LOC has functionally similar resources for every state. More on some of these later.

Hat tip to the Resource Shelf, which posts more items every day than will fit on my little protopage viewing widget!

Chronicling America in Newspapers

I don't need to be convinced of the genealogical value of newspapers -- I once found an entire branch of my great-great grandfather's sister's family from a two-line social note in a rural Illinois paper, just because it gave a woman's married name when she came to visit.

So, a belated hat tip to Christy Fillerup and Daniela Moneta on the transitional genealogists' listserv, for pointing us to the Library of Congress's search site for locating where newspapers have been published in the US, and where surviving copies can be found now. Another site from the National Endowment for the Humanities US Newspaper Program offers access to state-level data that may be more precise, especially in those states with newspaper projects of their own.

(I cannot forebear to mention that three of NEH's eight national-level repositories are in the Midwest: the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, and the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. Kansas State Historical Society is a fourth, and the rest are, um, out east somewhere.)

A chronic issue with catalog listings of old newspapers is imprecision about which dates are actually available. If the record says "1875-1877" check if there's fine print that says the issue you really really need is "wanting," i.e., not there. Or call ahead if it's a critical matter and a long trip. I also observe that some of the holdings listings appear to be 20 or more years old.

The war between the states that didn't happen

Thanks to the Wisconsin-based Internet Scout Project, I took a look for Midwestern articles at "The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Periodicals." Here's one from The New-England Magazine from November 1835 about the militaristic-sounding border dispute between Ohio and Michigan. (FYI this is just one collection of over 100 in the Library of Congress's American Memory.)

Twenty-three periodicals are represented, from The American Missionary to The United States Democratic Review. The longest run is 1815-1900 for the North American Review. I believe three are still in existence.

Note the difference between search options. You can search full-text, but only in uncorrected OCR, which is barely readable. The main search, on the other hand, is only for authors, titles, and other bibliographic information: it doesn't capture every word. So you could well miss a mention of an ancestral name if that person wasn't an author, title, or subject, and if their name was wrongly read by the OCR automaton.