Interested in mapping newspapers in Chronicling America collection? An interactive data visualization project at Stanford maps locations of historic newspapers in the Chronicling America collection. How cool is that?

The International German Genealogy Conference organizers in Sacramento (very cleverly) said they hoped attendees would have a “Eureka!” moment. I didn’t find any gold in streams, but I discovered something better. So, here’s my “I have found it!” moment, courtesy of one of Jim Biedler‘s presentations.

The Growth of Newspapers Across the U.S.: 1690-2011

In the search seen here, I was looking for German-language newspapers in Chicago in 1890. And I discovered that a town just outside the city limits – Forest Park – had two German-language papers.

Now I have two new historic newspapers to search, in a location I know my ancestors lived. The titles seen at bottom in orange are direct links to the papers at Chronicling America.

Search the Growth of Newspapers site at this link. In addition to searching by place and date, users can also search by publication language (Spanish, German, Chineses, Swedish, Italian, French) and by publication frequency.

Mapping Newspapers at Chronicling America search results

Mapping Newspapers with Big Data

Thanks to the staff of the Rural West InitiativeBill Lane Center for the American West: Dan Chang, Krissy Clark, Yuankai Ge, Geoff McGhee, Yinfeng Qin and Jason Wang. Their project was documenting journalism but it benefits genealogists in a big way too. I’ve waxed on before about using Chronicling America and about how much I enjoy newspaper research. Give mapping newspapers at Chronicling America a try.