Product benefits

• Find specific names and events using keyword searches and advanced features like text highlighting.
• Browse more than 400 newspapers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
• Enjoy a continually growing collection of titles dating from 1786 through the late 1900s.
• Learn more about your ancestors’ lives through legal notices, community events, wedding announcements, births and obituaries.

Need More Help Deciding?

Here’s what the Web’s largest collection of historical newspapers offers:

• Place yourself in the middle of history as it was happening. See how contemporary journalists interpreted crucial news stories and events.
• Discover the values that influenced your ancestors’ lives and emotions through newspaper stories.
• Observe changing patterns in dress, arts, politics, religion and technology.
• Save time by dispensing with microfilm. Ancestry.com’s complete newspaper collection is available only online.
• Expand your understanding of family history by placing your ancestors in the context of daily life.
• Get a visual sense of history by viewing the same news stories, photographs and cartoons that your ancestors once enjoyed.

Learn More About Newspapers

Newspapers are a rich chronicle of history

Newspapers are nearly as old as history itself. Though our modern image of the medium dates back to the Gutenberg Press (1440 A.D.), newsletters have existed since at least the second century. The Romans distributed political pamphlets called "acta," while newssheets appeared in China late in the Han Dynasty (around 200 A.D.).

Newspapers thrive in information age

Today, almost two thousand daily newspapers are distributed in America alone. From financial news to entertainment listings, newspapers remain an integral means of communication, historical preservation and human expression.

Why search newspapers online?

For the past year, Ancestry.com has been collecting thousands of pages per week and posting them online. With more than 5 million pages, this collection is now the largest historical newspaper database on the Internet.

Newspapers are also fully searchable, meaning you can locate particular points of interest without having to scan through pages of microfilm.

And because each page is a single digital image, individual articles can be printed from your computer and preserved in your family scrapbook.

We have newspaper archives from: