As the internet grows so do the data bases that family history can be found in. Newspapers offer a unique look into what living in a community was like even if they don't mention your family directly. What was the towns business, why did people live there what were the community concerns, can all be answered by reading period newspapers
For ancestors who lived in the last 200 years, newspapers can be, and very often are, an incredibly rich resource for personal information. The dream may be finding whole long articles specifically about the heroic things our ancestors did, filled with colorful statements in personal interviews, with plenty of background on who are ancestors were and how they lived. That’s not likely to happen. Your ancestor may have been involved in something newsworthy , and may have had an elaborate obituary – or he may not. But every little scrap of information should be extracted and analyzed – the ancestor’s presence on a jury list, or on a delinquent tax list, or as a witness to an accident, or attending a community party, or even their name on a list of letters waiting to be picked up at the post office. Nothing is too small to be of no potential use.
For those with Mormon Utah roots, the Utah Digital Newspapers database is the place to search, whether you live in downtown Salt Lake or have a computer link from your home in Greenland – and if you can’t find anything there today, try again in a few months; they add news batches constantly. For links to databases of historic newspapers in other places, both in the U.S. and a few other places, try this collection of links at the University of Illinois, and Wikipedia’s list of online newspaper archives. The Utah newspapers are freely accessible; some papers in the other two sources are free, while others are behind pay walls. Google News has a growing database. The New York Times archive is available at their site. The British Museum has a wonderful database of British newspapers that is often available through subscriptions at universities and other major libraries; libraries such as BYU have other digital resources available to people with institutional accounts. If you’re aware of other newspaper databases, especially free ones, please note them in the comments.
