January 23, 2026
Recently, I’ve been writing about using historic newspapers for genealogical research. Newspapers have long been one of my favorite resources. They can help us understand our ancestors’ lives and provide information not found elsewhere.
Newspapers are readily available on microfilm and are frequently digitized as well. Access is often free. They ought to be among the tools that every genealogist uses. However, I’ve heard several genealogists complain that they can’t find any articles about their own ancestors in newspapers. Therefore, they ignore newspapers.
Some of these researchers state that their ancestors were “just farmers,” and that no newspapers would have printed anything about such boring folks. Nothing could be further from the facts.
Most Americans who lived after the middle of the 19th century will almost certainly be mentioned in at least a few newspaper articles. Obituaries were published for many people during that period – particularly during the 20th century. Other articles listed births, deaths, divorces and marriages. Court cases were often reported in detail. Scandalous events and accidents usually merited mentions in the local newspaper.
The reason that some researchers can’t find their ancestors is because they’re looking in the wrong newspapers. Most of us tend to focus our newspaper search on cities and counties where our ancestors resided. This approach works well for ancestors who lived in a town or city that had a newspaper. It works less well for farmers from rural areas or for people who lived in very small towns.
I grew up in a small town in Utah called South Weber. During the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up, the town had fewer than 300 residents. It was too small to support a local newspaper. South Weber is in Davis County which had only a single newspaper, the Davis County Clipper, during this time. You might think this would be the logical place to search for articles about my family. However, in the mid-20th century, the Davis County Clipper focused on the largest city in the county, Bountiful. It had very few articles about my small hometown and its people.
Had I not grown up in the area, I might have assumed there were no newspapers which printed articles on the people from my town. Since I grew up in South Weber, I knew that the nearest city was Ogden. Ogden has published the Ogden Standard Examiner from the late 19th century until the present. During my childhood, the Standard was the newspaper that everyone in South Weber subscribed to. Obituaries, marriage announcements and other articles such as 80th birthday biographical sketches for people from my hometown appeared in that newspaper.
If I hadn’t known the area so well, I might have missed the Ogden newspaper. Ogden is in Weber County, just over the county line from South Weber. A search for newspapers in Davis County might easily have missed Ogden’s newspaper.
It would have been a significant loss in my case. Over the years I have located hundreds of articles about my immediate and extended family. I’ve learned about tragic hunting accidents and salacious family divorces. I’ve discovered articles listing the births of numerous relatives – some of whose births predated civil registration.
If you haven’t checked newspapers in nearby counties and states for articles about your family, take the time to check them. You may uncover a wealth of information like I did.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society