Researching Newspapers for Genealogy for Free

02/09/2013

12 Comments

 
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Having done a Google+ Hangout recently about the topic of searching for newspapers online, I received a few suggestions of new sites, as well as I did some additional research myself.  As a result, I created a YouTube video of the same name as this article's title.

In that video, there are some new links, which I thought I should replicate here, so here are the links to free sites, as well as some sites that contain even more links.

Below is the video, and below that are the links.

These are the links to the free sites and link aggregation sites:

Historic American Newspapers - Library of Congress

Penn Libraries - Historical Newspapers Online

Lawson Research Services (Leslie Lawson) - Newspaper Links of Old

Online Historical Newspapers Website (Miriam Robbins)

Wikipedia Online Newspaper Archives

 


Comments

Gary Haas link
02/12/2013 8:44pm

With a Wisconsin library card you have free access to newspaperarchive.com and every paper published in Wisconsin since 2005. It's hidden but it is there

Http://tinyurl.com/4frbnxg helps you

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Kenneth R Marks link
03/04/2013 10:51am

Thank you Gary for sharing that information. I was not aware of that!

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Mariann Regan link
02/13/2013 3:04pm

Kenneth, I really enjoyed the video, and I'm saving these links. I learned so much. I knew something about the Library of Congress newspapers, but not that they could tell you where offline newspapers were held! (1690-present is a lot of coverage! I like that!) The Penn Libraries site also looks excellent. Did not realize that you can take away the colored highlighting by saving as pdf. Neat! Knew about Leslie Lawson, but not about Miriam Robbins. And did not know there was a Wikipedia online newspaper archives.This is going to make newspaper research much more manageable for me, and I'm grateful to you for preparing this.

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Kenneth R Marks link
03/04/2013 10:55am

Thank you Mariann!. Glad that this is helpful. I love newspaper research and all these links indeed help.

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Jana Last link
02/15/2013 10:42am

Kenneth, I just wanted to let you know that your blog post is listed in today's Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2013/02/follow-fridayfab-finds-for-february-15.html

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Kenneth R Marks link
02/15/2013 8:01pm

Thank you Jana - I believe I tweeted a thank you today some time. I appreciate it!

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Lisa Sullivan Taisey
02/16/2013 5:43am

Many Thanks! This info is being bookmarked. I never understood why finding such valuable info in newspapers is so cryptic? A hidden asset that has tons of valuable info for FREE!

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Kenneth R Marks link
02/16/2013 7:51pm

Thank you, Lisa - I love newspaper research - it is the only way that I found out about many many stories that would have been hidden forever - two suicides, a great great Uncle who pimped out his stepdaughter, two women who sued their beaus because they got them pregnant and didn't marry them. Just for a start!

And these free sites just give us more tools to find more juicy stuff!

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Miriam J Robbins link
02/23/2013 7:10pm

Kenneth,

Thank you so much for your kind words concerning my Online Historical Newspaper site. It is truly a labor of love for me, although I never seem to have enough time to work on it. I hope you and your viewers will have patience with me as I add more and more links to the site in my "spare" time.

Your videos are well done, and I will be referring to them in a future post at the Online Newspaper Site companion blog: http://onlinehistoricalnewspapers.blogspot.com/.

Regards,

Miriam

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Kenneth R Marks link
02/23/2013 8:21pm

Thank you Miriam. Your effort for your site is immense and it is nearly impossible IMO to keep up - but it is incredibly useful what you have done. I love searching for newspaper articles for my ancestors. Since no one is alive who even remembers some of these folks, not even their names - this is the only way for me to access the real stories of their lives. BMD information can only go so far.

Thank you for the compliment regarding the videos. I am going to continue to do them.

Please share if you discover outstanding new sites and I will do the same.

Kenneth

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Christine M.
04/15/2013 11:37am

Sorry for the late add, but I wanted to be sure that "Old Fulton Post Cards" was mentioned--which is not all about Fulton nor post cards, but a site with many old New York State newspapers: http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html

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Kenneth R Marks link
04/15/2013 11:46am

Christine,

Thanks for the comment. The Fulton collection is listed in at least two of the 5 links that are included in this post. The links that I have included are a "list of links" and Fulton is included. It is not my desire to exclude anything, nor is it my desire to be a collector of links when they are already listed elsewhere. Thanks for the heads up. And I have used the Fulton collection many times!

Kenneth

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