MyHeritage is announcing new services hand-over-fist at this week’s RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City. Here’s the latest:
We’re delighted to announce the release of OldNews.com, an innovative website for historical newspapers, by MyHeritage. OldNews.com enables genealogists, researchers, and history enthusiasts to search, save, and share articles about people and events throughout history. At launch, OldNews.com includes a huge repository of hundreds of millions of historical newspaper pages from around the world, with millions more added monthly. The website features easy navigation and consists of a diverse range of high-quality publications, from major international newspapers to small-town journals and gazettes.
At launch, OldNews.com more than doubles the amount of historical newspaper content that was previously available on MyHeritage. The website includes all the historical newspapers from MyHeritage, plus new, unique content.
OldNews.com is available on desktop and via mobile web browser.
OldNews™ is good news
Historical newspapers are a treasure trove of stories that are rich in detail. In the past, you didn’t need to be famous to appear in the newspaper; anyone could be found in them, which makes them of tremendous value to genealogists, historians, and educators. Moving forward, OldNews.com will serve as MyHeritage’s focal point for historical newspapers. This release is just the beginning; we have an incredible pipeline of additional content and features, and ambitious plans to make OldNews.com the number one online repository of international historical newspapers beyond the English-speaking world.
Integration with MyHeritage
Existing MyHeritage users can log in to OldNews.com with their MyHeritage account credentials, and new users registering via OldNews.com can use the same login credentials to access MyHeritage. OldNews.com supports Two-Factor Authentication, for enhanced security.
Newspaper content on OldNews.com
OldNews.com offers a wide range of publications from local, national, and international news, with extensive coverage of the 1800s and 1900s. At launch, the website includes newspapers from across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Austria, Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, and Australia. Millions of newspaper pages are added each month, and content from additional countries will be added in the future. The OldNews.com website is available in 11 languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. More newspapers in some of these languages will be added soon.
The new content on OldNews.com was scanned using best-in-class optical character recognition (OCR) technology and enhanced with sophisticated algorithms developed in-house by MyHeritage. The website also offers optimized performance through a new technical implementation where the content is served from a Content Distribution Network, through a point of presence closest to the user. This means that users from all over the world can access OldNews.com at an extremely fast speed.
How to use OldNews.com
To get started, visit OldNews.com. If you already have a MyHeritage account, click “Log in” on the top right of the page and use the same credentials you use to log in to MyHeritage. If you don’t have an account yet, no worries! You can search OldNews.com anonymously, and you can create an account later to view the newspapers you’ve found.
The full announcement is much longer and offers more details. You can find it on the MyHeritage blog at: https://tinyurl.com/5n742kz8.