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!

Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, New York, and Washington New Pages and Updates

I have been adding new information to the website, but have neglected to send out updates. Here's what's new:

New Pages

Alabama - with one title from Google News Archive

Connecticut - with five titles from Google News Archive

Delaware - with one title from Google News Archive

Montana - with one title from the Montana Memory Project

Louisiana - with six titles from the Library of Congress


Updates

United States - now with the District of Columbia and 31 out of 50 states linked

California - one new title from Google News Archive; new county added: Butte

Florida - three new titles from Google News Archive

Illinois - 49 new titles: one from the Quincy Public Library, 37 from GenealogyBank, seven from Footnote, one from the Chicago Public Library, two from the UIUC Historical Newspapers Online, and one from the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection. New counties include Clinton, Douglas, Fayette, Gallatin, Hancock, Logan, Madison, Marion, Menard, Moultrie, Piatt, Rock Island, Sangamon, St. Clair, and Winnebago.

Michigan - one new title from Google News Archive; new county added: Shiawassee

New York - six new titles: two from Old Fulton on New York Postcards and four from the Rochester Regional Library Council

Washington - ten new titles: two from Google News Archive, one from the Washington Secretary of State, and seven from the Library of Congress. New counties include Benton and Kittitas.

Ancestry.com to Acquire iArchives

Press release from Ancestry.com announcing plans to buy iArchives, which includes Footnote.com:

Leading Brand for American Historical Content

PROVO, Utah, September 23, 2010 – Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq: ACOM) announced today it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire iArchives, Inc. and its branded Web site, Footnote.com, a leading American History Web site, for approximately $27 million in a mix of Ancestry.com stock, cash and assumption of liabilities. This acquisition will provide the company with a complementary consumer brand, expanded content offerings, and enhanced digitization and image-viewing technologies.

iArchives digitizes and delivers high-quality images of American historical records of individuals involved in the Revolutionary War, Continental Congress, Civil War, and other US historical events to Footnote.com subscribers interested in early American roots. iArchives has digitized more than 65 million original source documents to date through its proprietary digitization process for paper, microfilm and microfiche collections.

“Footnote.com is highly complementary to Ancestry.com’s online family history offering,” said Tim Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ancestry.com. “By promoting Footnote to our Ancestry audience, we hope to expand its reach among researchers who care about early American records. iArchives also brings outstanding image-viewing technology and content digitization capabilities that will improve our leadership position in bringing valuable historical records to the market. We welcome the iArchives team to the Ancestry.com family.”

Upon completion of the transaction, iArchives will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ancestry.com. As part of the transaction, Ancestry.com currently expects to issue approximately 1.0 million shares of common stock. The transaction is subject to various closing conditions and is expected to close early in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Ancestry.com also announced today that its Board of Directors has approved a share repurchase program of up to approximately $25 million of its common stock. Under the authorization, share repurchases may be made by the Company from time to time in the open market or through privately negotiated transactions depending on market conditions, share price and other factors and may include accelerated or forward or similar stock repurchases and/or Rule 10b5-1 plans. Part of the rationale for the repurchase is to offset dilution of equity resulting from the iArchives acquisition. No time limit was set for the completion of this program. The share repurchase program may be modified or discontinued at any time by the Board of Directors.

About Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq: ACOM) is the world's largest online family history resource, with approximately 1.3 million paying subscribers. More than 5 billion records have been added to the site in the past 13 years. Ancestry users have created more than 19 million family trees containing over 1.9 billion profiles. Ancestry.com has local Web sites directed at nine countries, including its flagship Web site at www.ancestry.com.

About iArchives
iArchives is a leading digitization service provider that also operates Footnote.com, a subscription Web site that features searchable original documents, providing over 35,000 paying subscribers with a view of the events, places and people that shaped the American nation and the world. At Footnote.com, all are invited to come share, discuss, and collaborate on their discoveries with friends, family, and colleagues. For more information, visit www.footnote.com.

Forward-looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or to future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of words such as "appears," "may," "designed," "expect," "intend," "focus," "seek," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "should," "continue" or "work" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These statements include statements concerning among other things, the proposed transaction between Ancestry.com and iArchives, Inc., including the consummation and anticipated timing of the transaction as well as the expected benefits of the proposed transaction, and the effects of the proposed transaction on Ancestry.com, our subscriber base, our reach, our activities to enhance subscribers' experience, our business outlook, our leadership position and our opportunities and prospects for growth. These forward-looking statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include a variety of factors, some of which are beyond our control. In particular, such risks and uncertainties include the risk that the transaction does not close when anticipated, or at all; difficulties encountered in integrating acquired businesses and retaining customers, and the additional difficulty of integration when continuing the acquired operation; the adverse impact of competitive product announcements; failure to achieve anticipated revenues and operating performance; changes in overall economic conditions; the loss of key employees; competitors’ actions; pricing and gross margin pressures; inability to control costs and expenses; and significant litigation.

Information concerning additional factors that could cause results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements is contained under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2010, and in discussions in other of our SEC filings.

These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

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!

Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio New Pages and Updates

New Pages:

Alaska - my newest state page is Alaska, with eight titles from GenealogyBank, 24 titles from NewspaperArchive, and one title from Tundra Times. This makes 26 states plus the District of Columbia that are now available for US papers.

Updates:

United States - now with 26 states plus the District of Columbia linked

Michigan - one new title from the Farmington Community Library

North Carolina - one new title from the Washington County, NCGenWeb site

Ohio - one new title from the Cleveland Jewish News

Wyoming New Page

I've just added a page for the state of Wyoming, with 186 titles from the Wyoming Newspaper Project! This makes 25 out of 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, that are now linked from the United States page!

Recent Updates and New Pages for Titles Digitized by the LOC

I recently checked the Library of Congress' (LOC) Chronicling America website and found there were numerous titles I needed to update (the availability of years for a particular title) or add to my website. Corrections are where I've found errors in my original listings and made the necessary changes

New Pages:

Kansas - with five titles from LOC

Oklahoma - with one title from LOC

Oregon - with one title from LOC


Updates:

United States - now with 24 out of 50 states plus the District of Columbia linked

Arizona - 10 new and four expanded titles from LOC

California - one new, two expanded, and one corrected title from LOC

District of Columbia - three new, six expanded and one corrected title from LOC

Hawai`i - eight new titles from LOC

Illinois - one title from LOC - this is a new state for Chronicling America titles!

Kentucky - four new, 10 expanded, and four corrected titles from LOC; also two new and three corrected titles from Kentuckiana Digital Library

Missouri - three new titles from LOC

New York - one new and one expanded title from LOC

Ohio - nine new and one corrected title from LOC

Pennsylvania - two new and one expanded title from LOC

Texas - one expanded title from LOC

Utah - four new, two expanded, and one corrected title from LOC

Virginia - seven new and one expanded title from LOC

Washington - seven new and one expanded title from LOC