Advice requested for online newspaper archive sites

[Quentin Fennessy]

I'd like to search Massachusetts newspapers for wedding and birth announcements. I've searched at newspaperarchive.com with no luck (for Mary McNamara and Mark Carr). I've also used the Google news archive, and the New York Times archive with no luck.

I'd like to hear about other good sources for newspaper archives. The family in question lived in Charlestown, I believe.

Thanks
QF

[Barbara]

I use genealogybank.com.

[Quentin Fennessy]

Originally Posted by Barbara

I use genealogybank.com.

Thanks, I'll give that a try. They are offering 30 days for $10.

QF

[genealogist.lily]

Originally Posted by Quentin Fennessy

Thanks, I'll give that a try. They are offering 30 days for $10.

QF

I guess this one depends on where you are researching. A fabulous newspaper site is http://news.nnyln.net/
Northern New York Library Network has done an outstanding job of digitizing old newspapers and making them available - free - online.
Lily

[bkirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by genealogist.lily

I guess this one depends on where you are researching. A fabulous newspaper site is http://news.nnyln.net/
Northern New York Library Network has done an outstanding job of digitizing old newspapers and making them available - free - online.
Lily

The US Newspaper Project (collaborative project between the Library of Congress and the NEA) has enabled every state to preserve old newspapers. You can read about it at http://www.loc.gov/preserv/usnppr.html. You can usually find the URL for the state you are interested in pretty easily on Google.

[colinc]

For UK researchers the Times, Guardian and some others have on-line archives and the British Library is also digitising selected provincial papers from C19 (actually up to about 1910).

For many British public library users the first and last of these can be accessed for free from home, via their library's web site, and this will also give access to the full 'Who was Who' and the 'Oxford Dictionary of National Biography', Grove and other biographical works. The Guardian does short-term deals and the Financial Times is about to do something as well.

The Jewish Chronicle also has a site. However not only does it have to be paid for, but it has the world's worst OCR. To be clear: I have never come on anything nearly as bad for free, let alone paid for, and quite by chance I came on a whole page about an ancestor which the index had not picked up, despite the name being repeated on the page. Also if you copy something from the search page and paste it back into the search box often it won't even find that! However, if you know a library that has back numbers you can see what you can get out of the index and then look it up on paper or on microform.

When it come to quality the Times is very good, but probably not quite up to the NYT's amazing standards.

The National Library of Australia is also hard at work, with the interesting take that users can correct the OCR errors they find, though I am not sure how they stop people making malicious changes.

Cheers, Colin

[clairebettag]

Originally Posted by bkirkpatrick

The US Newspaper Project (collaborative project between the Library of Congress and the NEA) has enabled every state to preserve old newspapers. You can read about it at http://www.loc.gov/preserv/usnppr.html. You can usually find the URL for the state you are interested in pretty easily on Google.

Many of the historical papers microfilmed in the USNP are now being digitized in the new collaboration between LC and NEH (Chronicling America). Information about the project and what is available is at: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/