A genealogist can get a lot of information about his or her ancestors from newspapers. Most newspapers contain obituaries, and those contain all kinds of details about a person’s life. There also could be articles about local events that an ancestor participated in. Before you can get the information you need from newspapers, you have to locate them. Plenty of them are accessible online.
There are two places that a genealogist can go in order to be able to sort through an archive of old newspapers. One, of course, is your local library. Many libraries have put old, fragile, newspapers onto somewhat more durable microfiche. Libraries that have the resources, and the right technology, could be working towards digitizing their entire newspaper archive.
Another great place to find newspaper archives is online. One place to start is with the Google News Archive Search. There are over 2,000 newspapers that have been digitized, and added to this archive. Type whatever you are searching for into the search engine on the page, and it will bring up links to all the relevant newspaper articles that are within this archive.
Recently, Google stopped adding additional newspapers to this archive, but the ones that already had been added are still accessible.
You can also try GALLIEO. This is an archive of information, (including newspapers), that is run by the University System of Georgia. You might have to be a citizen of Georgia in order to access this archive. As far as I can tell, this archive contains newspapers from Georgia, only.
The Library of Congress has an archive of “Historic American Newspapers”. They are calling this archive “Chronicling America”. Use the search engine on the page to type in what you are looking for. You can adjust the search parameters to fit within certain dates. You can also narrow down the search to one particular state, if that will help your research.
One more resource to try is NewspaperArchive.com. It claims to be the world’s best resource for historical and genealogical information. The archive has more than 400 years of family history, small town events, world news, and more. It has a search engine designed for you to use to locate information about your ancestor.
The Green Free Library Newspaper Archive is hosted by NewspaperArchive.com. This resource has more than 148,897 newspaper pages that have been digitized, and put online. There is a link on this page that will get you started specifically searching obituaries.
Image by Daniel R. Blume on Flickr