Access Thousands of Historic Newspapers Online

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Chronicling America

Free
The Library of Congress and NEH first launched this digitized historic newspaper collection in early 2007, with plans to add new content as time and budget permits. Over 1,900 digitized newspapers, encompassing more than 10 million newspaper pages, are fully searchable. Available papers cover portions of most U.S. states between 1836 and 1922, although availability varies by state and individual newspaper. Ultimate plans are to include historically significant newspapers from all states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922.

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Newspapers.com

A subscription-based historical newspapers website, owned by Ancestry.com. — Newspapers.com is one of the easiest-to-use newspaper subscription sites, with easy searching, browsing, and clipping. Ancestry.com

Subscription
This historical newspaper site from Ancestry.com has over 3,900+ newspaper titles, encompassing over 137 million digitized papers, and continues to add additional newspapers at a rapid rate. The navigation and user interface is much easier to use and more social media friendly than most other newspaper sites, and you can subscribe at a 50% discount if you are also an Ancestry.com subscriber. There is also a higher priced subscription option that includes "Publisher Extra," with access to over 360 million additional pages licensed from newspaper publishers.

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GenealogyBank

Subscription
Search for names and keywords in over 1 billion articles, obituaries, marriage notices, birth announcements and other items published in historical newspapers from all 50 U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia. GenealogyBank also offers obituaries and other more recent content. Combined, the content covers over 320 years from over 7,000 newspapers. New content added monthly.

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Newspaper Archive

Subscription
Tens of millions of fully-searchable, digitized copies of historic newspapers are available online through NewspaperARCHIVE. About 25 million new pages are added each year from newspapers primarily in the United States and Canada, although 20 other countries are also represented. Both unlimited and limited (25 pages per month) subscription plans are available. NewspaperARCHIVE can be pretty pricy for individual subscribers, so it's also worth checking to see if your local library subscribes!

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The British Newspaper Archive

Search over 580 historical newspapers and 13 million newspaper pages from Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. Findmypast Newspaper Archive Limited

Subscription
This partnership between the British Library and Findmypast publishing have digitized and scanned over 13 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection and made them available online, with plans to increase the collection to 40 million newspaper pages over the next 10 years. Available stand-alone, or bundled with membership to Findmypast.

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Google Historical Newspaper Search

Pittsburgh Historical Newspapers - Google News Archive — A 1933 issue of "The Pittsburgh Press" relives the city's Butcher's Run flood of 1874. Google News Archive

Free
Google News Archive Search was all but abandoned by Google several years ago but, thankfully for genealogists and other researchers, they left the previously digitized newspapers online. Poor digitization and OCR makes all but the major headlines virtually unsearchable in many cases, but all can be browsed and the collection is entirely free.

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Australian Newspapers Online - Trove

This free Australian online library database hosted by the National Library of Australia includes over 7 million searchable pages from historical Australian newspapers. National Library of Australia

Free
Search (full-text) or browse over 19 million pages digitized from Australian newspapers and some magazine titles in each state and territory, with dates ranging from the first Australian newspaper published in Sydney in 1803, to the 1950s when copyright applies. Newly digitized newspapers are added regularly through the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP).

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ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Free through participating libraries/institutions
This large historical newspaper collection can be accessed online for free through many public libraries and educational institutions. Over 35 million digitized pages in PDF format can be searched or browsed for major newspapers, including The New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. There is also a collection of Black newspapers from the Civil War era. Digitized text has also gone through human editing, improving search results. Check with your local library to see if they offer access to this collection for library members.

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Ancestry.com Historical Newspaper Collection

Historical newspapers are one of many databases available with a subscription to Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com

Subscription
Full text search plus digitized images make this collection of more than 16 million pages from over 1000 different newspapers across the US, U.K. and Canada dating back to the 1700's a treasure for online genealogy research. The newspapers don't show up in general results very well, so limit your search to a particular newspaper or to the newspaper collection for better results. Many, but not all, of the papers here are also on Newspapers.com

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The Scotsman Archive

The Scotsman Digital Archive offers searching and browsing of over a century of newspaper content. Johnston Publishing Ltd

Subscription
The Scotsman Digital Archive allows you to search every newspaper edition published between the paper's founding in 1817 through 1950. Subscriptions are available for terms as short as one day.

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The Belfast Newsletter Index, 1737-1800

Free
Search through over 20,000 transcribed pages from The Belfast Newsletter, an Irish newspaper that began publication in Belfast in 1737. Almost every word on the pages is indexed for searching including personal names, place names, advertisements, etc.

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Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection

Colorado's Historic Newspaper Collection includes 120+ newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 to 1930. Newspapers come from 66 cities and 41 counties throughout the state, which were published in English, German, Spanish, or Swedish.

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Georgia Historic Newspapers Search

Search digitized issues of several important historic Georgia newspapers, the Cherokee Phoenix, the Dublin Post, and the Colored Tribune. An outgrowth of the Georgia Newspaper Project managed by the University of Georgia Libraries.

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Historical Newspapers in Washington

Search or browse several important historic newspapers as part of the Washington State Library's program to make its rare, historical resources more accessible to students, teachers and citizens across the state. These papers are hand-indexed by name and keyword, rather than dependent on OCR recognition.

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Historic Missouri Newspaper Project

About a dozen historic Missouri newspapers have been digitized and indexed for this online collection, a project of multiple state libraries and universities.

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Northern New York Historical Newspapers

This free online collection currently consists of more than 630,000 pages from twenty-five historic newspapers published in northern New York during the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s.

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Fulton History - Digitized Historical Newspapers

Alice Ingersoll is charged with conspiracy to murder her husband in Syracuse, New York, in 1904. Fulton History / Tom Tryniski

This free archive of over 34 million digitized newspapers from the U.S. and Canada is available due to the hard work and dedication of just one man—Tom Tryniski. The vast majority of the newspapers are from New York State as that was the original focus of the site, but there are also select other newspapers available, mostly from the midwest U.S. Click on FAQ Help Index at the top for tips on how to structure searches for fuzzy searches, date searches, etc.

More: Historical U.S. Newspapers Online by State