Newspapers and Periodicals  TOP^

The Newspapers & Periodicals Collection lets you discover a wealth of information about your ancestors from many different kinds of newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. These types of sources can often supplement public records and provide information that is not recorded anywhere else. You can learn more about your ancestor's lives by placing them in the context of their daily lives.

For example, a newspaper account of a marriage might indicate that it took place at the home of the bride's parents, perhaps even naming them; it might list the occupation of the groom, or indicate that the ceremony was part of a double wedding in which the bride's sister was also married. These types of details are not likely to appear on a marriage record at the local courthouse.

Featured Collections  TOP^

• Historical Newspapers. The newspaper collection at Ancestry is the largest historical newspaper database on the Internet. You can search or browse newspaper titles from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. These newspapers date from the 1700s to 2001. Because each page is a single digital image, you can print individual articles from your computer and preserve them for your family scrapbook.

  Newspapers can be used to find valuable genealogical information about historical events in the lives of our ancestors. They supply all sorts of clues about vital statistics (birth, marriage, and death announcements), obituaries, local news, biographical sketches, legal notices, immigration, migration, and other historical items that place our ancestors in the context of the society in which they lived.

  View a newspaper article about the assassination of President Lincoln

• Obituary Collection. The Obituary Collection contains the same records as the obituary collection included in the Birth, Marriage, and Death records. This collection contains recent obituaries (from 1999 to the present) from hundreds of newspapers. The records include source information and links to the full obituary text. If you're searching for a recently deceased ancestor or a living relative who might be mentioned in an obituary, this may be a great place to start.

  The wealth of genealogical and biographical information to be found in an informative obituary makes the effort of searching for one worthwhile. For many of our ancestors (and relatives), the obituary is the only "biographical sketch" that was ever devoted to that individual. In addition to names, dates, and places of birth, marriage, and death, the obituary often identifies relationships of the deceased as child, sibling, parent, grandparent, etc., to numerous other individuals. This wealth of information can often answer questions or open up new research avenues.

• Free Historical Newspaper Images. This feature contains free newspaper images from some of the most interesting events in recent history. You will find articles on the assassination of President Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, the murders of Jack the Ripper, and the Korean War, and more. You can also find human interest articles such as the marriage of Elvis Presley, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, and the cloning of the first sheep.

  View a newspaper article about the sinking of the Titanic

• Periodical Source Index (PERSI). PERSI is the largest and most widely-used subject index covering genealogy and local history periodicals written in English and French (Canada). The collection dates from approximately 1800. There are currently over 1.7 million searchable records and nearly 6,000 different periodicals. Note: PERSI is not a full-text index; individual names that are mentioned in passing will not appear in the index.

Types of Records  TOP^
The Historical Newspapers Collection contains newspapers from these locations:

Other Countries

Canada
England
Ireland
Scotland

• Newsletters have existed since at least the second century. The Romans distributed political pamphlets called "acta,"; newssheets appeared in China during the late Han Dynasty (circa 200 A.D.)
• The first regularly published newspaper in what is now the United States was the Boston News-Letter, which was begun in 1704.
• Today, almost two thousand daily newspapers are distributed in America alone.
• Early American newspapers are full of notices that list runaway slaves, indentured servants, and apprentices.
• Newspapers can contain a multitude of genealogical information-obituaries; notices of births, marriages, and deaths; legal notices; estate transactions; biographies, military, immigration.

FAQ  TOP^

What is the Historical Newspapers Collection?
Newspapers are an essential information source for genealogists and historians alike, providing rich contextual information about what life was like at a specific time and place. The Historical Newspapers Collection brings the images of original newspapers as near as your home computer; you can view headlines, articles, letters to the editor, obituaries, marriage announcements, even advertisements, from as early as 1786.

The newspaper pages in the collection are fully indexed and searchable, greatly enhancing the usefulness of this collection for researchers looking for specific names or events. Because Ancestry has committed to add 1,000 newspaper pages a day, this collection will soon be the largest searchable collection of historical newspapers available online.

What are the benefits of searching the Historical Newspapers Collection?
The Historical Newspaper Collection is an excellent resource for "fleshing out" the details from the local events that affected our ancestor's lives. Once you learn the basic dates and locations of the events in a person's life, you can use historical records, like newspapers, to learn what happened in the areas where he or she lived.

Newspapers record the day-to-day happenings of a local community. You could consider them to be a diary of local events. They may include birth, marriage, and death announcements; obituaries and biographical sketches; legal notices; details about people moving into and out of the area; and other events. These may include information not included in the official records.

How do I search the Historical Newspapers?
The newspaper pages in our Historical Newspaper Collection are fully indexed and searchable. The index for the Historical Newspaper Collection utilizes advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology which recognizes text within an image. This method of indexing depends entirely on the quality of the image. If there are quality limitations to an image, this feature will not be fully accurate--but it's the best alternative to going through the papers page-by-page. For an excellent detailed description of the OCR technology, click here.

• Searching. You can search by name, keyword, newspaper title, date, and location.
• Browsing. If you know the newspaper's name and place, enter it into the search template; otherwise, use the map to choose a state or country, then use the calendar to choose a specific issue. You will be taken to the first page of the paper.

How do the Newspaper indexes work?
The indexes for our Historical Newspaper Collection utilize advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology which automatically recognizes text within an image. Even though the text of the Historical Newspaper images is too extensive to be manually indexed, this exciting technology allows us to identify text within a complex image. Please note that the accuracy of this feature depends entirely on the quality of the image. If there are quality limitations to an image, the index search results for that image will not be as accurate. For this reason, you may find some results for images which do not contain the exact word for which you searched.

What is the Periodical Source Index, or PERSI?
The Periodical Source Index (PERSI) is the largest and most widely used index of genealogical and historical periodical articles in the world. It is a comprehensive subject index to genealogy and local history periodicals written in English and French (Canada) since 1900. The collection includes literature dating from the 1700s and can prove very useful in your genealogical research.

To find out more about the Periodical Source Index database (PERSI), click here.

Related Articles   TOP^
For more information on using newspapers in your genealogical research, see these articles:
Using Hometown Newspapers to Gather Little-Known Facts by Roseann Reinemuth Hogan, Ph.D.
Research in Newspapers (Excerpt from The Source) by James L. Hansen
What's in those Old Newspapers? by Roseann Reinemuth Hogan, Ph.D.

For more information on periodicals, see these articles:
Indexes to Genealogical Periodicals by Kip Sperry
Periodicals of Various Shapes and Sizes by Juliana Smith
Searchin' Serials: Using Periodicals in Genealogical Research by Curt B. Witcher