Digital Newspaper by States

From the Penn Libraries, they have placed online all the present available digital newspapers from different time periods covering each of the states in the United States. Some states like Nevada have six newspapers running from the late 1800s to into the 20th century. Other states like New Jersey have 25 newspaper listing representing the many towns and regions of the state over different time periods. An interesting feature are also the many African-American newspapers also in the collection.

Locate the hometown state for an ancestor. Scan over the selection, looking for a town’s name or county or even a region. For example for the area of West Palm Beach, FL, you could also look for ‘South Florida’ or ‘SE Florida’.

Click on a selection and there will be thumbnails images of the front page with dates of available papers. You can search for a certain date but a specific name is harder. There is available a general Google search box, but other location with that surname will also appear.

Once you locate a newspaper of interest, you can enlarge the print to read it easier. Remember to look not just for certain ancestors, but also businesses and advertisements of the day.

Some of the newspapers do have a search box just for their papers, making the search easier. Some have even transcribed the text of all the articles.

You can right-click to save the page, or do a screen print to your computer or just print out the page to keep.

Many of the states also have a listing for ‘Chronicling America’ from the National Archives which covers newspapers from around the 1820s to 1922.

So newspapers are an excellent resource for any one doing their family history, this list needs to be bookmarked and referred to often.

< Return To Blog