Free Newspaper Archives

One of the amazing things about diving in to family history research is discovering how often family members get mentioned in old newspaper articles.

Back in the days before the internet....heck! before the telephone!...newspapers reported everything about everyone! Small town publications, in particular, covered local news in great depth. Vital statistics like births, deaths and marriages were routinely reported. So were events like a new store opening, a job promotion, a noteworthy society party, a community picnic, a local ball game, or some darker family moments -- a barroom brawl, an arrest for public drunkenness, or even a murder or two somewhere deep in the family closet.

Happily, there are tons of online newspaper archives where you can poke around and find out what great-grandma and grandpa were up to back in the day. The US has done an especially impressive drop of moving historical archives online, but there are also sources in pretty much every corner of the globe, and in many different languages.

Free newspaper archives from the
US and around the world

NewspaperArchive.com and Newspapers.com both have wonderful and deep collections of historical newspapers with easy and powerful search tools to help find family members from long ago. These are both subscription services, but they offer free trials and worth a visit, even if you aren't inclined to subscribe (I subscribe to both, by the way...I think they're essential).

But there are also a ton of true free newspaper archives out there. FreeNewspaperArchives covers the US region by region, while XooxleAnswers has links to free historical newspapers listed by state. There are some wild and wonderful vintage newspapers listed at these sites, like the Civil War collections from Gettysburg, or if you prefer, South Carolina. There are even Revolutionary War era papers from New Hampshire and Virginia. But no need to venture back hundreds of years...many archives take you right up to modern times

Another XooxleAnswers page covers international newspaper archives from Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, some in English and some in other languages. There are also pages of special collections, such as college newspaper archives, and free magazine archives.

Also check out online state archives. Almost all state collections have at least a smattering of news articles, and many of them offer deep newspaper archive collections that won't be found elsewhere.

No matter where your ancestors hailed from, and where they travelled to, there are hundreds of free newspaper archives available where you can search for their stories at no charge.

Free Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Sanborn maps have a certain elegance, no?

I have a lot of links for you today, with just a little background, and a little diatribe.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps were drawn up for many cities and towns in the late 1800's and early to mid-1900's.  They are wonderful sources of insight and detail on how and where your ancestors lived and worked.

The maps list almost all buildings, streets, places of work, parks, schools, many residences, and town/city layouts.  Maps from different years show changing street names, boundaries, and land use.  You even get to find out if a factory had sprinkler systems, elevators, and was made of brick, wood, or stone...the maps are that detailed.

A fair number of Sanborn maps have been digitized, and are available in free online collections.  That's the good.  The collections are sometimes infuriatingly difficult to browse, with very large maps being made available a small window at a time, with limited panning and zoom tools; that's the bad.  The maps are never ugly, however...quite the opposite (I just wanted to throw ugly in the title).  So without further ado, here are some links to online, free collections of Sanborn insurance maps (and maps from a few other sources, as well).

• Alabama
• California (San Francisco)
• California (Santa Cruz County)
• Colorado
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii (Dakin Insurance Maps)
• Illinois (Aurora)
• Indiana (Indianapolis)
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Kentucky (along with ME and NY)
• Louisiana (New Orleans)
• Maine (along with NY and KY)
• Massachusetts (Boston)
• Missouri
• Montana (use the username and password provided under "Sanborn" heading)
• Nevada
• New Jersey (Princeton)
• New York (along with KY and ME)
• New York City
• North Carolina
• Ohio (Cincinnati)
• Oregon (Oregon City)
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Utah (search on 'Sanborn Maps')
• Virginia (Charlottesville)
• Assorted maps from the Library of Congress
  (including the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ)

There are many more such maps in hardcopy and microfilm collections; check with your community library or town/county historical society for local resources.

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

World War I and World War II British Commonwealth Deaths

WWI Australian infantryman--a favorite photo!

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains the Debt of Honour Register, with 1.7 million names of Commonwealth soldiers killed during WWI and WWII. The Register includes some civilian casualties from the Second World War as well.

The scope of the database is as vast as the British Empire itself. Most of the names are from major Commonwealth countries -- UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.

But the actual burial sites of the dead can be found pretty much worldwide: 15,000 names in Israel and Palestine, 52,000 in Egypt, 7,000 in Libya, 38,000 in Burma (Myanmar), 29,000 in Singapore, 55,000 in Tanzania, 37,000 in Turkey, 6,000 in China, 62,000 in India.

If you have family history with any English, UK or Commonwealth roots, this easy-to-use site is certainly a database to explore.

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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

Some Military Family History Resources That You May Not Know About

1st LT Tom Holland, Vietnam

The US Military has some huge databases online. 

A few of them contain extensive historical records of military actions, and reports by, or about, individual soldiers, platoons, units, companies and every other category used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines (and the Reserves, Coast Guard, etc). These are available to the public, and they're free.

Perhaps it's no surprise that these datasets are also rather bureaucratic and not the most user-friendly. Maybe that's why they're not often used by genealogists or those casually searching for family history records. But still...they contain so much information that they are definitely worth a look. So, without further ado...

The Army Heritage Collection Online is a military history website that is both a pointer system to offline records, as well as a large library of digitized information that is fully searchable. There's an incredible assortment here: oral histories, field reports, letters and diaries, memoirs, along with a large body of photos and artifacts. Poke around this site, as there are other resources here as well.

The Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) is another useful resource that includes many soldiers by name, such as the collection of yearbooks from the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy. Click on the Digital Library tab to restrict your search to online content.

I've covered a number of other terrific sources of military information in earlier posts. Have a look at:

• Civil War Soldiers and Sailors
• More Civil War Resources
• World War I and II Enlistments
• Medieval English Soldiers
• Veterans' Gravesites
• British Soldiers of World War I and II

Good luck, everybody.


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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

Some Civil War Genealogy Resources You May Not Know About

Civil War soldiers of the Sixth Maine Infantry

The Civil War. War Between the States. War of Northern Agression. The Southern Rebellion. War for Southern Independence.

Whatever you call it, this was one of the great conflicts in history. It was also the beginning of modern military record-keeping, so that there are deep family history resources available from this era, regardless of whether your ancestors wore Blue or Gray. Some mid-19th century resources that you should be aware of include:

The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS), which I wrote up in an earlier blog post.

The Making of America collection (a joint project of Cornell University, and the University of Michigan) has a number of important collections from the Civil War era that are useful for family history. The War of the Rebellion reports are comprehensive records of the Union and Confederate actions, including prisoners, correspondence, field actions, etc. Note than many first names tend to be abbreviated (eg Danl for Daniel). Civil War Naval Records also are a deep resource.

Cornell also houses an important Anti-Slavery collection. The materials here can be especially useful in researching African-American family history.

You can view, or download, the official List of pensioners on the roll January 1, 1883: giving the names of each pensioner, the cause for which pensioned, the post-office address, the rate of pension per month, and the date of original allowance (whew!). These records can be easily searched for your family names; just use the "Search in this book" feature on the left hand side of the page when you visit the above link. This is only one of several volumes; see the "Other editions" links at Google Books for additional volumes in this series.

Also from Google Books, here's a listing of fully-searchable Directories from the Civil War era. Think of them as phone books for the days before the phone was invented! There are directories here for Boston, Rochester, Hartford, Madison, Doniphan County (Kansas), and many other places. There's even a directory of clergymen.

And take a look at the Special Collections page of Free Newspaper Archives, where you'll find several online newspaper archives focused on the Civil War from both a North and South perspective.

Happy exploring.


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Don't forget to also check for your family history at NewspaperArchive and Newspapers.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots. And visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.