Finding historical newspapers

Official records tell you that someone was born, married and died. Newspapers tell you that she won the spelling bee, that his barn burned down in 1911, and that the whole family went to visit cousins in Des Moines over Christmas. For family historians and local historians alike, old newspapers are where people turn back into people.

They're also frustrating. Most American newspapers have never been digitized, the ones that have were scanned from worn microfilm, and the text recognition that makes them searchable gets a lot of words wrong. This guide covers where to look and how to search well.

Free collections

The largest free collection of digitized American newspapers is the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, built through the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. State partners, usually a state library, university or historical society, choose and digitize papers from their states. The collection covers papers published through 1963 and holds millions of pages, including many small-town weeklies and foreign-language papers.

Chronicling America also includes a directory of US newspapers that lists titles, dates and which libraries hold copies. Even when a paper isn't digitized, the directory tells you where the microfilm is.

Many states run their own digital newspaper projects, often through the state library or a university, and some include papers that aren't in the national collection. Search for your state's name plus "digital newspaper" to find them. Some public libraries have digitized their own hometown papers and make them free on the library's website.

Paid databases and library access

Several commercial databases hold large newspaper collections, often with papers the free projects don't have, especially after the 1920s. Subscriptions can be expensive. Before you pay, check your public library: many libraries provide free access to one or more newspaper databases, sometimes from home with a library card. University libraries may allow on-site access to visitors.

Microfilm: most of the archive

Most newspaper history still exists only on microfilm or in bound volumes. If your family lived in a small town, the local weekly may never have been scanned. To read it:

• Check the newspaper directory in Chronicling America, or ask a librarian, to find which libraries hold the film.
• The library in the town where the paper was published often has the most complete run.
• State libraries and state historical societies often hold the largest collections for their state.
• Ask about interlibrary loan. Some libraries lend microfilm reels to other libraries, so you can read them nearby.
• Many libraries will look up a specific obituary or article for a small fee or for free if you give them a name and an approximate date.

Reading microfilm is slow, so narrow the dates first using other records. A death date from a certificate or a cemetery listing tells you which week to read.

Searching scanned newspapers

Search engines for digitized papers rely on optical character recognition (OCR), and OCR on century-old newsprint is rough. Faded type, columns that run together and unusual fonts turn "Johnson" into "Iohnson" or "Jolmson." Some tactics:

• Search for the surname alone within a narrow date range and place.
• Try common OCR errors: rn read as m, h as li, e as c.
• Search for an unusual first name, a street address or a business name instead of the surname.
• Remember how people were named in print. Married women often appeared as "Mrs. John Smith," with no first name of their own. Men often appeared with initials only.
• Use phrase searches sparingly, since one misread letter breaks the match.
• When you find a hit, read the whole page and the same column in the weeks around it. Follow-up items are common.

Some collections let users correct OCR text. If you fix a name you've found, the next researcher will find it more easily.

What to read besides obituaries

Obituaries are the obvious target, and they're valuable: they often name parents, children, siblings, the church and the cemetery. But the most interesting family details are often elsewhere.

Local columns

Small-town papers ran "personals" or community columns listing who visited whom, who was ill, who moved away, and who came home from college. In rural areas, each surrounding hamlet might have its own correspondent. These columns are where you learn that great-grandfather went to Chicago to look for work in 1907.

Legal notices

Courts and governments had to publish notices. Probate notices name heirs. Notices of naturalization hearings, delinquent tax lists, sheriff's sales and divorce summons all name people and places. They're dull reading and excellent evidence.

Marriage and birth announcements

These often appear as one-line entries in a list. They can give exact dates in places that didn't yet register births and marriages with the state.

Advertisements

A family business might advertise every week. Ads give addresses, partners' names and what the business sold, and the year an ad disappears can hint at a sale, a move or a death.

Foreign-language papers

Immigrant communities published their own newspapers in German, Polish, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian and many other languages. They often printed more about community members than the English-language press did. Chronicling America and several university libraries hold foreign-language titles.

African American newspapers

The Black press reported births, deaths, church news and travel within communities that mainstream papers often ignored. Many titles are digitized in free and subscription collections.

Citing and saving what you find

Save a copy of the full page, not just a clipping, and record the newspaper title, place, date, page and column. Titles changed often, so note the exact title on that day's masthead. If you download from a database, note which one.

In the United States, works published more than 95 years ago are in the public domain, so you can generally share old newspaper pages freely. More recent articles may still be under copyright, and databases have their own terms of use for their scans.

A word about recent newspapers

Reading about your own ancestors from a century ago is different from digging up a recent news story about a living neighbor. Crime reports and arrests were common newspaper items. When your research turns up something like that about living people or their parents, think carefully before sharing it. Our guide on privacy and ethics covers how to handle it.