Thursday 5 August 2021

Chronicling America newspaper resource

It's all one big learning journey, is this genealogy lark!

In response to my blog post yesterday that FindmyPast has now removed US and Canadian newspapers from its platform (see http://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2021/08/us-and-canada-newspapers-removed-from.html), I've received an email this morning from reader Robert Dolbeare, pointing me towards another resource that I have not come across which features US based newspapers. From Robert:

To your recent findmypast post on Scottish Genes, many U.S. newspapers are available for free courtesy Library of Congress at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

I have just had a quick look at the site, Chronicling America, and this looks like it is well worth plundering, and without mercy - there's a lot of good stuff there! Here's the site's blurb about itself:

Chronicling America (ISSN 2475-2703) is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

So far there are 18,412,16 pages available, just under about half that available on the British Newspaper Archive at present, so certainly not an insubstantial amount. The text appears to be searchable, and you can also access information about the newspapers featured. Well worth exploring!

(With thanks to Robert)

 

Chris

Just out, Sharing Your Family History Online is on sale at https://bit.ly/SharingFamHist. Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 is also out, as are Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for that Chris, most useful site to have access to - hope it grows along the lines of the Australian 'trove' and British Newspaper Sites.

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