120 Million Historic U.S. Newspaper Pages Now Available from Advantage Archives

For the last 5 years, I have been tracking the online collections made available by the Advantage Archives (formerly Advantage Preservation) company, which has contracted with several hundred libraries and other institutions across the U.S. to digitize and host their online newspaper collections.

These links have also been incorporated in the state collection summaries found in the Newspaper Links page on this site. 

The most recent update from Advantage Archives totals 990 collections from 47 states (plus one Canadian province) and a total number of pages exceeding 120 million! Of those, 44 are non-newspaper collections (e.g., yearbooks, directories, local documents). Also, 85 of the collections are only accessible in the library.

Some of the collections are small, but others have over 50 different newspaper titles. Although Advantage Archives gets the credit for making these available, much of the credit should go to the individual libraries, library systems, historical societies, and other institutions, who do the really hard work of obtaining the funds via grants and other funding sources to digitize these old newspapers and make them available online for their patrons. In these times where funding for the digitization of old newspapers from libraries, archives, and other institutions is not easy to get, those of us who want to research our genealogy through newspapers and other documents owe a large debt of gratitude to the librarians and archivists who make all of this possible. The moral of the story is “Support your local libraries and archives!”

Here is a list by state and county of the online newspaper collections available to search for free. (Please note that the few non-newspaper collections are included because they do have genealogical value):

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Manitoba

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Vermont

Virginia

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

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