Transcriptions of Newspaper Articles



A web site titled Newspaper Abstracts‘ can be of assistance to the researcher, especially with the older, sometimes difficult to read newspapers. With the numerous online sites carrying scanned images of whole newspaper pages it can hard in some cases to locate the family surname or location on the page. Some site highlight in yellow the keyword search word, but most do not.

Using Newspaper Abstracts, the whole article or a portion of the article is already transcribed in easy typed format. These articles can be about weddings, a funeral, an obituary, an election, church activities, a new business, school programs, a town’s disaster, court cases, deeds, crimes, or a whole variety of other topics.

This site provides the extracts and abstracts from newspapers over the decades from across the United states and other countries. On the homepage there are the countries: United States, England, Scotland, Canada, Ireland, Wales, Australia and Norway. Not every location and time period in all these countries is covered. The vast majority do come from the United States – over 95,000 articles. There is a total of 97,649 articles with all the countries. They are all transcribed and submitted by fellow researchers and are free to use.

Select the country first, then at the top of that page is a search box. For the United States you can search the entire country or make a selection from the drop down box of a state. Place a surname, a date, a hometown in the search box. For example, placing Indiana for the year 1901, there were 15 articles. For each listing (any obituaries, general articles, court cases etc) there is a full date, a brief heading title and the newspaper’s name. Click on the newspaper’s name for the transcribed article. Keep in mind, using a date can appear anywhere in the article, not just when the article was printed. However, there are numerous articles that actually dating back to the early 1800s.

So you may not find everything about your ancestors, but you never know just what you might discover, something that was overlooked in trying to read the small font printed newspapers online or on microfilm.

Photo: NY Times Nov. 11, 1918

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