Showing posts with label old newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old newspapers. Show all posts

Friday, January 8, 2010

Newspaper archives

In addition to the St. Pete Times, Evening Independent, Ocala Star-Banner, Gainesville Sun, FSU Flambeau, and other Florida newspapers I've mentioned in earlier emails, I have noticed three new digitized sources that might be helpful for researchers in Florida history or genealogy.

1. The Daytona Beach Morning Journal has coverage from 1937 forward.
2. The Sarasota Herald (later Herald-Tribune) has coverage from the mid-1920s, including the boom-era years.
3. The Afro-American (published in Baltimore and Washington, DC, national edition) has coverage for much of the 20th century. The national edition of this paper, similar to the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers, often included vignettes from Florida communities.

You can access these online by going to the Google news archives search portal at:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search?ned=us&hl=en

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Papers Past

I wanted to pass along this great resource I discovered while doing research early this morning. Called “Papers Past,” it is a scanned digital archive of many pre-1920 newspapers from New Zealand. While located about as far away from Florida as one could be in a geographical sense, these papers offer excellent coverage of late nineteenth century events throughout the United States and Florida (such as the Spanish-American War and its effect on Tampa).

Here’s the link:

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=p&p=home&e=-------10--1----0-all

Some newspapers are fully searchable; others may be browsed but have not yet been scanned with OCR that would allow full-text searching. What makes this collection so amazing is that it covers a substantial portion of the mid- and late-nineteenth century (from 1839 to 1920), provides free access, and allows for the easy saving of digitized “clippings” (just right-click!). It complements the Times of London and historical New York Times. The other nice thing—similar to many of the old county newspapers from throughout the United States before the 1920s—is that it includes excerpts borrowed by NZ papers from other publications that have never been microfilmed or digitized and thus no longer exist in their original form.