The first digital newspaper archive came online more than 20 years ago. Within a few years, the Library of Congress partnered with other federal agencies to launch Chronicling America <chroniclingamerica.loc.gov>, a free resource for US newspapers.
Today, newspaper pages can be digitally scanned in a fraction of a second, and websites (both free and premium) host over a billion historical news pages. Even if your relatives appeared in obscure or unexpected publications, digitization has made their names much more discoverable.
Where should you turn to find digitized newspapers for your ancestors’ communities? Perhaps you’ve searched in the past, only to be discouraged by what you couldn’t find. Or maybe you’ve considered subscribing to a premium newspaper website, but aren’t sure which is best for you.
Stop the presses.
We’ve hit the stacks to compare the newspaper giants: Chronicling America, Fulton History, GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive. Like intrepid reporters, we’ve investigated how much digital content each site offers, as well as their relative strengths. From our scoop, you’ll learn about their curation processes, relevant copyright restrictions, and (of course) what you should expect to pay.
Read on for that and you subscribe, and give you a new respect for the tremendous wealth of old newspapers. Clear your calendars and grab some coffee—a billion pages is a lot of newspaper to cover.
