Your family didn't necessarily have to be famous or wealthy to make the news — at least not after the introduction of the penny newspaper in 1833 made newspapers easily available to the masses. Important life events such as births, marriages, deaths, and funerals often appeared in the local newspaper, as did land transactions, court proceedings, school achievements, and other information on the everyday life of the area's inhabitants. Beyond the names and dates, newspapers frequently contain firsthand accounts of important events and issues, and reflect popular thinking and cultural attitudes of the time. Even the advertisements are enlightening, offering insight into local fashion, trends, and the cost of living.

Prior to the Internet, using historical newspapers to research family history was generally undertaken only by the most tenacious researchers. They just weren't easily available, often existing only on microfilm at the local or state library. Newspapers also don't typically come with an index, so newspaper research generally involves a lot of research and guesswork just to select the newspaper and issue(s) most likely to contain information of interest. Once the search has been narrowed to a particular newspaper and time period, newspaper research can still involve hours spent in front of a microfilm reader scrolling through page by page, skimming line after line.

Online access to historical newspapers has changed the scope of newspaper research, making it much more easily available to anyone interested in their family history. Many publishers and organizations have recently undertaken the digitization of historical newspapers in order to preserve and provide increased access to their rich history and commentary. The entire archive of the New York Times — dating back to its first issue in 1851 — is just one such example of the many historical newspapers that have been made available for viewing via the Internet. These treasures of digital history present a great source for gaining knowledge about your family and the time and place in which they lived.

In addition to increased access, the digitization of historical newspapers allows for easier research with tools such as zoom, pan, and full-text search. The full-text search does come with a caveat, however. Most digitization projects use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automatically recognize text within the digitized newspaper images. This process is much quicker and more cost-effective than manual indexing (can you imagine the effort the latter would take?), but does lend itself to inaccuracies. This is especially true for older newspapers where the typeface was a bit more flowery and may be harder for a computer to accurately decipher. Search results may include extraneous “matches” on words that the OCR technology believes are optically similar enough that they could be your target word. As a result, searching in historical newspaper databases can require quite a bit of creativity and patience, but the rewards are often immeasurable.

To locate historical newspapers online, first learn what paper(s) covered the location and time period in which you're interested. Then do a search for the paper by name and location plus terms such as archive or historical. There are also websites which link to online papers and collections organized by state, such as “Historic Newspapers Online” (http://genealogy.about.com/od/newspapers/tp/newspapers_online.htm). Many historical newspapers are also found in the following large collections which include content from newspapers across the United States as well as other countries such as Canada, Australia, and even Jamaica.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers

This collection of full-text and full-image articles from prestigious U.S. newspapers was first created in 2001 with the digitization of the New York Times. Other major newspapers now included in the fully searchable database include the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, New York Tribune, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Science Monitor. Every issue of each title includes the complete newspaper in downloadable PDF format and full-text search with a variety of advanced search options. This collection is only available through subscribing libraries and institutions, and is not available for individual subscriptions. Check with your local, college, or state library to see if they subscribe to any or all of the newspapers in this collection. Many offer free in-library and remote access to their patrons.

NewspaperARCHIVE

This subscription-based service is one of the largest historical newspaper collections available online. The NewspaperARCHIVE database (www.newspaperarchive.com) contains more than 60 million full-page images from historical newspapers from around the world, ranging from the 1700s to the present. Coverage varies by newspaper, so use the Browse Available Papers feature to see which publications and dates are available before subscribing to a full-access membership. Online cancellation is available, but refunds are not offered for unused time. Selected papers from the NewspaperARCHIVE collection are available as part of a World Vital Records (www.worldvitalrecords.com) subscription.

Ancestry.com Historical Newspapers

Historical newspapers are available as part of the Ancestry.com subscription website. The Historical Newspaper Collection (www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/periodicals/news) offers access to more than 16 million pages from selected years of thousands of newspapers across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, dating back to the 1700s. Individual subscriptions to just the newspaper portion are not available; you have to subscribe to the entire Ancestry.com U.S. or World Record Collection.

GenealogyBank

A product of the information provider NewsBank, GenealogyBank (www.genealogybank.com) offers more than 480 million articles, obituaries, marriage notices, and birth announcements published in more than 4,300 historical U.S. newspapers, from 1690 through 1977. You can search the site for free and see brief excerpts that contain your search results, but you'll need to subscribe to view the entire article. A similar service, operating under the name America's GenealogyBank, is offered as a subscription service to libraries, so check to see if you have free access through your local or state library before subscribing.

Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers

A joint project of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), the National Digital Newspaper Program is a twenty-year plan to create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all states and U.S. territories. The project's website, Chronicling America (www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), allows you to find information about American newspapers published between 1690 and the present, including the libraries that carry each title. The free database also allows you to search and read the currently digitized newspaper pages which at this time includes newspapers published between 1860 to 1922 in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. As long as funding allows, the project will continue to expand its coverage.

SmallTownPapers

Newspaper archive company SmallTownPapers (www.smalltownpapers.com) provides free access to more than 300 small-market newspapers from across the United States dating back as far as 1865. This collection is also available as part of Footnote.com.

Newspaper Abstracts

Volunteers have transcribed and placed online more than 50,000 pages of abstracts and extracts from historical newspapers at Newspaper Abstracts (www.newspaperabstracts.com). These are partial transcriptions, not fulltext articles or digital images, but the site is entirely free.