NewspaperARCHIVE

NewspaperARCHIVE is a digital image archive on the Internet which contains an extensive number of newspaper issues from both large and small newspapers around the world, spanning more than 400 years. Pages are browseable and searchable.

= Access =


 * NewspaperARCHIVE.com A membership fee is required, although certain institutions, such as your local library, may offer access without charge through their own respecitve websites.  Pages are viewable in PDF format, which may be saved to disk.
 * Ancestry.com provides access to the very same archive, with more sophisticated browsing and searching tools, including "fuzzy" synonym or homophone searches and the ability to narrow browses and searches down by county instead of just city or state. A membership fee is required to view newspaper pages.

= Tips =

The following will increase your success with NewspaperARCHIVE.com's search engine:


 * Newspapers in any one city may be archived under several different names and editions throughout the years, therefore, narrow browses and searches down only to city (county is unavailable) and not to only one specific newspaper title.
 * Over- or under-inflated numbers of search results will be returned if they exceed what will fit on one page.
 * If too specific a query is entered (which is very easy to do), no search results will be returned, and if too broad a query is entered, an overwhelming number of search results will be returned; therefore it is recommended to search only by date(s) and city, and using only one of the most likely unique words. For example, if looking for a reference to John Lyndes, search only for "Lyndes", as searching on "John Lyndes" will return every page that includes "John", making the search results excessively large.
 * Search results are presented by page, not by article, and relevance is determined purely on number of occurrences per page. Since newspaper pages are quite large and often include ads, this can make searching quite cumbersome for certain queries.
 * The search engine is not sophisticated enough to do "fuzzy" searches, which recognize synonyms or homophones. Therefore, for example, when searching for "Artemus Smith" or "William Jones", it will not also include results for "Artemas Smith" or "Wm. Jones", respectively.
 * Some pages were very faded, damaged, or omitted when scanned, therefore the indexing of the text is not always accurate, sometimes making manual browsing necessary. For example, "Hull" at times may be indexed as "Hall", or a faded section may appear as "11ull" or some other approximation, rendering the index useless. Be aware that if pages were omitted during scanning, this may cause NewspaperArchive.com's page number to differ from the newspaper's actual page number.