MyHeritage Adds 11 Million Australian Newspaper Pages

Old newspapers might be seen as trash by many people. But, to genealogists, they are a treasure! There are things you might be able to find in an old newspaper that simply aren’t available anywhere else. You might find an ancestor’s obituary, or an article about a baking contest she won. It is easy to see why MyHeritage decided to add 11 million pages of Australian newspapers to its collection.

American genealogists might already know where to find old newspapers that were printed in the United States. It isn’t as easy to find the ones from other countries. For example, your local library might have old newspapers on microfiche, but their collection probably doesn’t include old newspapers that were printed in Australia.

MyHeritage has added 11.4 million pages of Australian newspaper records to their collections. Those pages come from a total of 700 Australian newspapers. The collection was digitized by the Trove (The National Library of Australia). The collection covers newspapers from 1803 to the mid-20th century. Each Australian state and territory is represented in the collection. The majority of the collection, however, consists of newspapers from New South Wales and Victoria.

In the next five months, MyHeritage is planning on adding 5 million new pages to this collection. That means you should check back periodically to see what has been added. The newly added pages just might have something important about your ancestors printed on them.

It is possible to search MyHeritage’s Australian newspaper collection now. There are a total of 14,911,020 records in the collection. Some of that information may include birth announcements, marriage announcements, death announcements, and news of graduations. You might find an ancestor’s obituary. There could be articles that mention something significant an ancestor did while he or she was in high school.

The records in the MyHeritage Australian newspaper collection are being offered for free at MyHeritage SuperSearch. That means that if you use SuperSearch, and something from the Australian newspaper collection matches, it will turn up there. The records in the collection will soon be matched with all family trees that are on MyHeritage.

What if you don’t happen to have any Australian ancestors? MyHeritage also has a more generalized historical newspaper collection that you can search. An old newspaper could give you an interesting glimpse into what your ancestor was really like.

Image by Jon S on Flickr.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* New Biographical Resource From Australia

* Queensland Australia Databases

* Australian Records – Ryerson Index