Searching Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers highlights a portal with video guides on using and searching Chronicling America, the Historic American Newspapers database from the Library of Congress and NEH.
Chronicling America, begun in 2005, is a database and companion website produced by the United States National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, maintained by the LOC. The Chronicling America website contains digitized newspaper pages and information about historic newspapers to place the primary sources in context and support future research. The project is described as “long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.” Local participants in the project receive awards to scan approximately 100,000 newspaper pages, primarily from microfilm.
Although it’s designed for teachers and students, the “What is Chronicling America?” site” has a lot to offer genealogists. The site houses introductory videos on using the database, curated links for searching, and an ever-growing guide to individual state newspaper partner’s podcasts, videos, and blogs” that can help extend your family resources to partner libraries and archives.
The Using and Searching videos are available at the NEH portal for the newspaper database. You can watch the introductory video here:
For more posts on using historic newspapers for genealogy research, click here.
