August 23, 2024
Newspapers are a great genealogical resource. They can help add context to people’s lives. They can also stand in for other more difficult-to-obtain records such as death or birth certificates. Obituaries are often the only written record of a person’s life. Newspapers are especially useful when a genealogist is trying to follow families forward.
Thanks to widespread digitization, newspapers are widely available online. Free sources such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and paid sites such as Newspapers.com make a wide variety of newspapers accessible for most genealogists.
Most digitizing projects tend to focus primarily on newspapers from the nineteenth century and the first twenty or so years of the twentieth century. Due to copyright laws and privacy restrictions, fewer newspapers have been digitized and made available for the later part of the twentieth century.
Many newspapers published a digital version of their print papers beginning around 2000. These digital copies can be found at the website of the newspaper in their archives. Some will allow free access, but others will require a subscription.
This means that newspapers from the mid twentieth century until the beginning of the twenty-first century are generally not digitized. Many are available on microfilm in local libraries and sometimes in state archives. These newspapers, unlike the digitized ones, are not usually indexed which makes finding articles difficult.
Obituaries are the most easily found records in the unindexed newspapers if a death date is known. Obituaries were commonly published in newspapers during this period for most people. A manual search of a few days can usually locate an obit.
Sometimes, a visit to an out-of-area local library is not possible. In that case, it’s worth calling the library. Some have indexed obituaries from the local newspapers and can easily make copies. Other repositories will do a limited search if a date is known.
Searching for a name throughout the run of a newspaper as can be done with digitized papers is not easy. It can be done, but it is time consuming. Many microfilmed newspapers can be borrowed through interlibrary loans from various repositories. Reading through newspapers on microfilm is not for the faint of heart or those who suffer from motion sickness. It is a possibility that you may want to consider if you know that someone lived in a certain area, and you believe there may be articles about him/her in a local newspaper.
If you are searching for an obituary or other specific article and you know the date, it is usually possible to locate a copy of the article. It may take some time and effort, especially if you can’t visit the repository who holds the record, but it is worth being persistent.
Newspaper articles can help fill in many holes in a family tree. Finding that a newspaper from the area and era you need is digitized is exciting and can lead to all sorts of discoveries about your family. Finding that a newspaper exists for the time and place you need but is not digitized can be frustrating. It’s worth trying to obtain at least obituaries and other dated articles from those newspapers since they can provide so much family information that is unavailable elsewhere.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society