Veridian Software has many clients with collections of digitized newspapers that can be searched for free. Over 250 million pages currently. They power the newspaper collections of California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. And country-wide collections, such as Estonia, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and Switzerland. Veridian is the name of […]
Author: Kenneth R Marks
Kenneth R Marks was born and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving a BS in Mathematics in 1968. His career was in Information Technology; with the last 20 Years as a software executive with Boeing, Pearson, and NASA. His genealogy career began in 2004. He is an expert in newspaper research for genealogy, as well as additional genealogy topics. He regularly conducts webinars on the subject and has authored three genealogy books. See the About page for more details.
The Ancestor Hunt, founded in 2008, is focused on helping genealogy and family history researchers of all skill levels to achieve their goals, by providing links to free online genealogy collections, and search tips and techniques, largely via easy-to-understand Quick Reference Guides.
Newspapers were often printed on inexpensive paper that was never intended to survive for generations. Over time, paper yellows, ink fades, and repeated handling or exposure to light further reduces readability. While the article may still be visible to the human eye, OCR software often struggles with the low contrast, causing names and important details […]
Ancestry.com continues to add or update its record collections at a fast pace for us to search. For the period of June 1-30 2026, the new and updated collections are: I hope that some of these are what you have been waiting for! Good Luck and Happy Hunting!
The British Newspaper Archive, a subscription site owned by FindMyPast, has announced its updates for last month. There are 31 New Titles and 127 Titles that have had issues added. There are a total of over 105 million pages available on the site. A complete list of all of the site’s titles can be found HERE. […]
Chronicling America, the newspaper collection, is available for online research of United States historical newspapers, and it regularly updates its collection. Here are the updated titles for last month. Some are new titles, and some are added to an existing title’s pages in the database. There are 25 in total. Important Note: These links are […]
Find My Past is an underappreciated source for digitized newspapers. It is a subscription site that specializes in British and Irish newspapers. Currently, its collection numbers over 105 million pages and is growing rapidly. This month, Find My Past added 25 new titles and added to 108 existing titles. They are listed below: New Titles Updated […]
Newspapers.Com is one of the larger subscription newspaper sites. At the date of this publication, they claim over 1.23 billion digitized pages from over 31,000 titles. Here is a list of the new titles from the past month. United States California Florida Illinois Louisiana Alexandria Arabi Baton Rouge Lafayette LaPlace Marksville New Orleans Shreveport Massachusetts […]
FamilySearch continues to add or update its record collections at a fast pace for us to search. For the period of June 1-30, 2026, the added/updated collections are: For a complete list of all added/updated collections, go to https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list I hope that some of these are what you have been waiting for! Good Luck and […]
A woman’s name in the newspaper often depended on the event being reported rather than her legal identity. Social columns, wedding announcements, legal notices, and community news frequently used different naming conventions, making it easy for the same person to appear under multiple names. Researchers who search only one version of a woman’s name may […]
Newspapers often reflected the names people used in everyday life rather than the formal names found in official records. Reporters routinely printed nicknames, pet names, and familiar forms that were widely recognized within a community. As a result, researchers searching only for formal names may completely overlook newspaper references to the very people they seek. […]