Newspapers are full of the names of people in your ancestors’ community, captured in records of family milestones such as births, deaths, marriages and other expected and unexpected events. Business openings and closings, house sales, court cases, job promotions and notable awards, criminal actions, and unusual or noteworthy occurrences all make their way into the papers. In particular, obituaries often contain a
rich narrative of a person’s life from the family’s perspective, and identify surviving relatives by name, valuable information that may be difficult to find elsewhere.

Nearly all major daily newspapers – and many minor ones – have searchable archives dating back to the date they started publishing, and many of those archives have been digitized for online searching. Some have even been optimized for genealogical searching, and include first and last names fields, but for other archives, you will need to rely heavily on keyword searching to find what you are looking for.

If you’re wondering how to find old newspaper archives, one way to begin your search is to identify the major daily and weekly newspapers that served the place where your ancestor lived. The advantage to researching in newspaper archives of larger papers is that they are more likely to be digitized, and they may be large enough to document local events, public notices, community activities, and important moments within society. 

The more local the paper, the more likely the news is to be about strictly local events, or the impact of national events on a local place. For example, while a major paper will report the overall death tallies from a battle, a regional paper may run an in-depth article about the local soldiers who died in the battle, citing their actions, and even mention their family members and other relevant facts.

Not all newspaper archives are optimized for genealogical search. If you are able to search an archive or database by keyword only, first determine what information was indexed for the keyword search. Your ancestor’s name may not be included in that indexed information, so you may want to use broader terms, and then scan articles to see whether your ancestor is mentioned. Remember when searching for your ancestor’s surname to try alternate spellings. You can also try searching for locations, relevant keywords relating to events associated with your ancestor, and approximate years. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, try broadening your search terms. Most failed searches result from people looking for overly specific terms.

American Ancestors has a variety of historical newspaper and journal archives newspaper archives and journals to explore. Here are selections from a few of our collections.