The Ancestor Hunt regularly adds and updates new collection links, as well as searches for and fixes broken links.
(This page's most recent update is November 2025)
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Many small-town and rural newspapers — especially from the 1800s through the 1930s — have no name index, weak OCR, or scans that are incomplete.
But these papers are also where the richest genealogical gold lives: everyday life, community networks, small announcements, and details never printed in big city papers.
This Quicksheet gives you the strategy-first roadmap for finding ancestors when you cannot rely on a simple name search.
Download the Quicksheet PDF
To obtain a four-page Quicksheet PDF of this information, download it by clicking on the Download button below:
For all the previously published Quick Reference Guides, click on QuickSheets.
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