Kentucky Digital



1919-Kentucky school houseThe Kentucky Digital Library has a really nice collection of digital newspapers, photos, maps, directories, journals, yearbooks, books and a variety of other collections for the public to view online. Just starting with the photos; there are photos of the 1921 basketball champions, numerous farm images, places across Kansas; over 62,000 photos available. Each image can be enlarged for greater detail. Most also have a description of the place, people, dates and what event is taking place. Click on the ‘PDF’ at the top to save an image.

With the newspapers, there are almost 100,000 covering many decades. Just for the year 1860 there are 1,860 newspapers. In 1925 there are 510 and for 1861 there are 2,804 newspaper articles to go over in Kentucky. Available are hundreds of newspapers dating to 1800 to 1810.

When you select a year for a newspaper article, the newspaper name appears, the full date, and a thumbnail image. Just to browse over select years is fascinating to see what life and events was like for any Kentucky ancestors.

If you select to search using the search box you can place a keyword, place or surname as any newspaper article with that term. There will also be a list of the dates that have the keyword you searched for. Select that year and then the individual paper you need. Now there is no highlighting of the key search word, but just the one page the term would appear, so you will need to read the columns.

Or click on the ‘Text’ tab at the top and that page will convert to text words – one long column. It can then be searched using the ‘Find’ feature of your computer. The image of the page also allows to to look at the newspaper pages before and after your selected page. You can zoom into a newspaper illustration or column for easier reading.

You can also search on the newspaper name. Still place the keyword you want in the search box then you will see the selection of newspaper titles that have an article relating to the keyword.

Review over the selection titled ‘Collections’ there is a wide variety of topics covered here, all in digital format. There are additional collections of photos (family albums), organizational information of clubs, sports records at the colleges, records of business by certain companies and records of the GAR and many others.

With any Kansas ancestors this site is a necessary resource.

Photo: Group portrait of South Elkhorn, Kentucky students standing in front of the school house about 1919.

< Return To Blog

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.