Category: Colorado Digital Newspapers

Posted in Colorado Digital Newspapers, Newspapers, Utah Digital Newspapers

Genealogy’s Star: Online Digital Newspaper Collections by State — The Lists Introduced

Posted on by Dayna Jacobs - "On Granny's Trail"

This post is reblogged from Genealogy’s Star blog, by James Tanner.  There are some great links to lists of online newspaper collections and it seemed worthwhile to just reblog the whole post. I will soon reblog his list of online newspapers by state, or you can just go straight to his blog for it.

There are two preliminary parts to this blog post which include an introduction and a review of the applicable copyright law. Here are the links should you care to review the background and issues of this very interesting topic.

Now on to the blog post:

There are quite a few collections of newspapers that cover extensive blocks of time and geography, i.e. they include more than one state’s newspapers. It is important to understand that there is some overlap between these huge online collections, but any thorough genealogical search would necessarily require searching every single collection. Of course, that could become a problem since most of these collections are subscription based and not only does the genealogist have to find all of the collections, they also have to figure out how to access them and possibly pay for the content. I say this so that the potential researcher does not feel comfortable ignoring the subscription based sites and only researching the free online content.

You might also recognize that the effectiveness of the various search engines and the degree to which the optical character recognition programs work affects the ability of a researcher to find specific content using a search. There is really no way that a careful researcher can be assured that there are not important facts about any given ancestor other than to do a page-by-page search, assuming that the online project provides access to multiple pages of the same search. Researchers should also recognize the fact that helpful information may be contained in paid advertising and display advertising in the newspaper digitization project may not have been included, especially if the advertising consisted of images rather than text. But if you come from an old genealogical tradition, you are used to searching microfilm page and page and this is no different.

As it turns out, unlike digital maps websites, there are exhaustive online references to newspaper collections listing each state of the United States in detail. It also turns out that there are a huge number of websites, far more than you could imagine. There are hundreds of websites. Just think what a great opportunity this is. You will never run out of research opportunities.

There are a substantial online lists of available digitized online newspaper collections. See the following websites for lists:

Here is a list of the multi-state online digital newspaper projects that I have found. I do not pretend that this is an exhaustive list, because these collections are sometimes hard to find online and also because new projects pop up frequently. Just because I was unable to find a specific newspaper project for any of the states or territories does not mean that there are no online digitized newspapers from that jurisdiction, any such content may be included in one or more of the large collections.

[NOTE: Here is a list of regional and national lists of online digital newspaper collections Genealogy’s Star included with their state lists:]

 Now on to the state-by-state list. I am listing the states but still have very limited access to the Web here in Alaska and will republish this shortly with the data. Thanks for your patience. [NOTE: the links to Western States have been incorporated into On Granny’s Trail “Western States Links”]

Continue reading “Genealogy’s Star: Online Digital Newspaper Collections by State — The Lists Introduced” →

Posted in Archives and Libraries, Colorado Digital Newspapers, Indian traders, Newspapers, Research tips, Utah Digital Newspapers, Websites

Friday Finds: Digital newspaper archives for Utah and Colorado

Posted on by Dayna Jacobs - "On Granny's Trail"

Every week I try to share libraries, archives, or collections I have found useful to Western States researchers, and some of the things I have discovered within them.

This week I want to highlight the digital historic newspaper archives available for Utah and Colorado.  Family historians know newspapers are a valuable resource.

They are especially valuable in the western states because newspapers were established fairly early when communities were formed.  State and federal government offices were not very accessible to the remote settlements and sparsely settled states, and until the middle of the 19th century most of the west was under the jurisdiction of a territorial government.  Newspapers were much more likely to provide clues to early western settler’s lives than official government records before 1900.

Here are three tips for using newspapers in family history research:

1.  Look for more than births, marriages, and deaths in newspapers.  Check out every “hit” the search finds and add these events to a timeline for an individual.  The other events in a person’s life can reveal vital clues as to family relationships, property they owned, and places they lived or did business.

2.  Search every newspaper within a 60 mile radius of a person’s home.  Vital events were sometimes reported in more than one newspaper.

3.   When looking for an obituary, include newspapers in the towns of a person’s grown children and siblings.

 

Utah Digital Newspaper Archive

The Utah Digital Newspaper Archive (UDN) can be found at http://digitalnewspapers.org/ and is one of the best online newspaper resources in the United States.  According to the website “UDN is built upon a distributed state-wide collection of newspapers that is aggregated into a single, searchable index hosted at the U of U. We partner with Brigham Young University, Utah State University, and Salt Lake Community College to accomplish this, each hosting a portion of the content.”

It is easy to use and can be searched by individual newspaper title or by the entire collection.  It is also browseable by title, which is helpful if you want to get a feel for community life during a particular time.  I especially like the “Browse by County” feature, as it is helpful to see which newspapers existed for a geographic region, and the “Paper Timeline” is a handy graph to  help you locate a newspaper by time period.  The advanced search feature allows for all kinds of creativity in searching for an elusive ancestor.  Here is an obituary I found for Alexander Matheson in Parowan, Utah:  http://tinyurl.com/78mw2yz

Colorado Historic Newspapers Collections

According to the website, “The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) currently includes more than 500,000 digitized pages, representing 163 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. Due to copyright restrictions, CHNC does not generally include newspapers published after 1923.”  The CHNC is not as easy to search as the UDN site, but it is still a great resource which dates back even before Colorado’s territorial history began in 1861.

I found out that J.B. Tanner (likely Joseph Baldwin Tanner) won several awards for horse breeds at the Montezuma, Colorado County Fair in October 1907.  This helps to place him in the area at that time.  Here is a link to the article:  http://tinyurl.com/7plgcbu  We also learn about his purchase of a new trading post in this article: http://tinyurl.com/7plgcbu