Friday Finds in Newspapers: 11 December 2015

Recently, I found the following articles regarding historic newspapers:

• Tip: Don't Just Rely on the Search Function When Using Newspaper Databases by Christine Manczuk at Ancestry Island
• The British Newspaper Archive celebrates its 4th birthday by Holly at FindMyPast Blog - make sure to watch the video!
• Digital Newspapers Provide Genealogy Surprises by Lee Drew at FamHist
• Have You Looked in All Newspapers? by Michael John Neill at Genealogy Tip of the Day
• Troy Irish Genealogy Website adds Death Notices Appearing in Troy, NY Newspapers 1797 – 1860 by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• More than 200,000 WWI-period Saskatchewan newspaper pages digitized by Gail Dever at Genealogy à la carte
• National Digital Newspaper Program by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• The Europeana Newspapers Project Now Has 20+ Million Newspaper Pages Available Online by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Also:

• The National Library of Australia's Trove has updated 363 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia.
• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 40 of its titles with more content from Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), South Carolina, Tennessee. Vermont, and Virginia
• In October and November, GenealogyBank added 18 new titles and updated 27 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from Arizona, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. Read details here and here.
• The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has added eight titles to its collection from the cities of Athena and Corvallis.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 4 September 2015

Recently, I found the following articles and items regarding historic newspapers:

• Ancestry Collaborates with Gannett to Digitally Archive More Than 80 U.S. Newspapers by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter  - includes The Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, The Arizona Republic, The Indianapolis Star, The Tennessean and many others
• 2015 NDNP Awards Announced - Wisconsin and Delaware Join the Program! from the Chronicling America blog
• Google Custom Search for English Newspapers by Dick Eastman of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter - a customized Google search engine that will search the major newspapers in England
• Taking Clues From Your Ancestor’s Ethnicity by Amy Johnson Crow at the Ancestry blog - an article from a year ago, but very pertinent and useful
• More than century of Centenary online from the Shreveport Times - college student newspapers from Centenary College
• The Dublin Gazette from 1750-1800 online by John D. Reid at Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections
• Connecticut State Library Receives New Grant for Newspaper Digitization from the Connecticut State Library
• Genealogy With Janice: Small town newspapers are a boon for family historian by Janice Nickerson at Inside Toronto
• Digital database breathes new life into newspaper archives by Venesa Brashier at Your Houston News
• How to Research Legal Notices in Newspapers for Genealogy by Gena Philibert-Ortega at the GenealogyBank blog
• Not fade away... how robots are preserving our old newspapers by Nicola Davis at The Guardian

Also:

• The National Library of Australia's Trove has updated 86 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and West Australia.
• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America (which is back online after a weekend of maintenance) has updated 15 of its titles with more content from the District of Columbia and Oregon.
• In August, Findmypast added eight new titles to its Irish Newspaper Collection and 22 new titles to its British Newspaper Collection. They also updated many titles with more content in both collections.

Chronicling America OFFLINE This Weekend

It's getting late; too late to post my Friday Finds in Newspapers, especially since I have an early beginning to my long day tomorrow.

I did want to post this notice that the Library of Congress sent out: all their websites, including Chronicling America, will be OFFLINE this weekend, while the Architect of the Library is performing maintenance.

They plan to be back online the evening of Sunday, August 30th.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 10 April 2015

Recently, I found the following articles regarding historic newspapers:

• State Not Archiving Newspapers by Lauren Mills at IowaWatch
• Troy (New York) Irish Genealogy Society Adds Marriage Notices Appearing in Lansingburgh Newspapers 1787 – 1895 by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• Please Copy by Michael John Neill at Genealogy Tip of the Day

Also:

• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 32 of its titles with more content from Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and West Virginia.
• The National Library of Australia's Trove has updated 70 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 27 March 2015

Recently, I found the following article regarding historic newspapers:

• Troy (New York) Irish Genealogy Society Adds Marriage Notices Appearing in Lansingburgh Newspapers 1787 – 1895 by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Also:

• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 10 of its titles with more content from Idaho, North Dakota, and South Carolina.
• The National Library of Australia's Trove has updated 25 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria.
• The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has added one title to its collection, Spilyay Tymoo, the current newspaper of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 20 March 2015 (A Day Late)

Recently, I found the following articles regarding historic newspapers:

• Extra, Extra, Read All About It --- The Detroit News SUBJECT Index Cards are Now Online at SeekingMichigan.org by LE at MCGG and Let's Talk...Genealogy
• New additions to BAnQ’s online newspapers collection by Gail Dever at Genealogy à la carte
• The focus for The Genealogy Guys Podcast #285 was Newspaper Research. This podcast is hosted by George G. Morgan and Drew Smith. Go here for more information on how to listen to a podcast.
• Now Online: Death Notices Appearing in Lansingburgh, New York, Newspapers 1787 – 1895 by Dick Eastman of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• Ancestry.com Launches Genealogy Website for Searching Irish Newspapers by Tyler at GenealogyInsider
• But WE know… by Judy G. Russell at The Legal Genealogist
• In search of the Eatonville Dispatch by Shawn Schollmeyer at Between the Lines (Washington State Library Blog)
• Milford (Michigan) Times Obituary Index 1929-1949 is now Online by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Also:

• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 17 of its titles with more content from Mississippi.
• The National Library of Australia's Trove has updated 35 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria.
• GenealogyBank added 31 new titles and updated 11 titles with more content. These include newspapers from Alabama, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington
• March 16 was the 188th anniversary of the founding of the first black newspaper in the United States, Freedom's Journal, which was published in New York City.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 13 March 2015

Recently, I found the following article regarding historic newspapers:

• Women's History Month 2015: Newspapers by Gena Philibert-Ortega at Gena's Genealogy - Gena points out that while it may be difficult to research our female ancestors, historical newspapers make it easier.

Also:

• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated two of its titles with more content from Ohio.
• The National Library of Australia's Trove has update  eight of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 20 February 2015

The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated seven of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from Connecticut, Louisiana, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 6 February 2015

The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 29 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oregon.

Friday Finds in Newspapers: 16 January 2015

Recently, I found the following articles regarding historic newspapers:

• Findmypast releases...new additions to their collection of British Newspapers: press release at GeneaPress
• Digital Newspapers May Index Unindexed Court Records by Michael John Neill at Genealogy Tip of the Day
• Newspaper Research: The Importance of Being Thorough by Debbie Mieszala at The Advancing Genealogist
• Perkins County, Nebraska, Newspaper Digitization Project is being Expanded by Dick Eastman at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
• Google Brings Back The Google News Archives by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable
• Newspaper Research Strategies Boot Camp – Saturday, 31 January 2015 by Thomas MacEntee at Hack Genealogy - Do you live in Australia and New Zealand and want to attend a really good webinar on newspaper research with awesome presenters? It's a great price, too! Don't know what a webinar is or how to attend one? Read my tutorial here.

Also:

• The Library of Congress' Chronicling America has updated 22 of its titles with more content. These include newspapers from Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, and South Carolina. 
• The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has updated one of its titles with more content.

New Website for New Mexico National Digital Newspaper Project

I received an email today from Andrew Weidner, Project Coordinator of New Mexico Historical Newspapers announcing that the New Mexico National Digital Newspaper Project (part of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America program) has set up a site to link to their content at http://newmexicodigitalnewspapers.weebly.com/. From this site, you can view a map showing the locations of where the digitized newspapers were originally published, a timeline of when they were published, and links to all the titles so far digitized. You can also read the related blog and see how far production has come (look for both under About in the menu).

Additionally, the Library of Congress has notified the the New Mexico Historical Newspapers project that another 30,000 New Mexico newspaper images will go online soon, including many new titles. Mr. Weidner will update me as soon as that happens.

 

News from the Library of Congress' Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

More than 550,000 pages and 100 Titles Added to Chronicling America in Recent Months

Since October 2011, the National Digital Newspaper Program has expanded the Chronicling America site by more than 550,000 historic newspaper pages published in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Including titles like the Wenatchee Daily World (Wenatchee, WA), the Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, OH) and the Montana News (Lewiston, MT), these pages have been digitized from collections in Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. More than 4.7 million pages are now available online, published between 1836 and 1922.

Kansas Historical Society to Digitize 100,000 Pages of Newspapers

 From the Topeka Capital-Journal:

Kansas has been awarded additional funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program, according to Kansas Historical Society officials.

As a result, the Kansas Historical Society will digitize an additional 100,000 pages of Kansas newspapers, dating from 1836-1922.

Read the rest of the article here.

NEH Announces $3.8 Million for 2011 NDNP Awards, Including Three New States

 From the Library of Congress:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced on July 27, 2011 awards totaling $3.8 million to 13 institutions representing their states in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Three of these institutions - Indiana State Library, State Historical Society of North Dakota, and the West Virginia University Research Corporation - are new to the program this year. Ten other institutions - the University of Illinois-Urbana, Kansas State Historical Society, University of Kentucky-Lexington, Louisiana State University, Minnesota Historical Society, Montana Historical Society, Oklahoma Historical Society, University of South Carolina, and the University of North Texas - have received continuing awards to contribute additional content to the program. This funding will support the selection and digitization of historic American newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 by each participating state, according to NDNP guidelines. The Library of Congress (LC) will make these newspapers available to the public through the Chronicling America Website (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) beginning in mid-2012. In all, 28 states have institutions participating in the program.

NDNP, a partnership between the NEH and the LC, is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of all U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. The NEH grant program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

News from Google News Archive and Chronicling America

 Google News Archive is ending their newspaper digitization project:

We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online. These have included publications like the London Advertiser in 1895, L’Ami du Lecteur at the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1910 to 1995.

Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing. [Hat tip to John D. Reid of Anglo-Celtic Connections]

A link to browse individual historical titles is at http://news.google.com/newspapers, and from there you can search the individual newspaper. I will continue to add these titles to my Online Historical Newspapers website. It does take time, and I am currently nearly finished with the titles beginning with the letter A.

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Meanwhile, the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project continues in full swing:

Last week, the Library of Congress updated the Chronicling America Web site with more than 230,000 additional newspaper pages in various titles. The site now provides access to more than 3.7 million searchable newspaper pages from 506 newspaper titles, published in 22 states and the District of Columbia between 1860 and 1922.

These titles are also being added and updated on my site. Keeps me busy!

Online Historical Newspapers Galore!

If searching through online historical newspapers for your ancestors and relatives to enhance your family tree is a fun past time, you'll be excited to hear that two major online historical newspaper websites made some great changes this week. And to sweeten the news, both resources offer the digitized newspapers for FREE!

First off, I happened to be working on my Online Historical Newspaper site, adding historic titles from Google News Archives from a .pdf file that one of my website users had kindly put together and sent me. The frustrating thing about Google News Archives is that up until recently, you could not easily find historic titles on their site. Article searches would produce results that included both current news articles (single article in text format only and most being pay-for-view) and historic articles (digitized whole historical newspapers - free to view). There was no comprehensive list of the digitized whole historical newspapers, so you usually only found a historic title if you knew the name of the paper and did a comprehensive search. If you were looking to find a historic title for an ancestral location, but did not know if one existed for that area, or what its title was, you pretty much were out of luck.

That changed this week. While I was working on my site and looking at one of the digitized historic titles I was lucky enough to find, I noticed a link in the upper right corner of the page: "Browse all newspapers." My initial thought was that this would simply take me back to the Google News site, with mostly current, pay-for-view titles. But to my surprise, it was a comprehensive linked list of all the historic titles in Google News Archive, with the dates of coverage!

I have only two beefs with this list: the first is that it does not list publication location of these titles; you must go in and view the paper and find the location on its masthead. The second is that you cannot download the pages or print from the site. You can, however, use your computer's Print Screen function. I hope to cover that in another post.

The second major website is the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site, which made the following announcement this week:

On December 15, 2010, the Library of Congress added more than 440,000 historic newspaper pages to the Chronicling America Web site. This most recent update expands date coverage for many titles already represented in the site and includes a wealth of content in new titles from Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. The site now includes more than 3.1 million pages from 414 titles published between 1860 and 1922 in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Since I have already added many of the Chronicling America titles to my Online Historical Newspapers site, I went in to take a closer look. On average, most of the changes are expanded years to existing titles and one or two more new titles for each state. Of course, all this is a good thing!

I am working hard to add all these new titles and updated expansions of years to my Online Historical Newspapers site, and hope the site will prove useful to your research by facilitating and narrowing your hunt!

More Newspapers Added: 380,000 Pages Added to Chronicling America, Including Pages from Three New States (LA, MT, SC

From the Library of Congress:

On Sept 16, 2010, the Library of Congress added more than 380,000 historic newspaper pages to the Chronicling America Web site, including newspapers from 3 new states - Louisiana, Montana, and South Carolina - and expanding the site's time coverage further into the Civil War era. The site now includes almost 2.7 million pages from 348 titles published between 1860 and 1922 in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Chronicling America is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.... Read more about it!

Links to these newspapers will be added to the Online Historical Newspaper Website soon!