New historic Ohio Newspapers now online at the Library of Congress

By | August 12, 2014

COLUMBUS— The Ohio History Connection is pleased to announce that 9 more historic Ohio newspapers have been digitized and uploaded to the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov thanks to a $248,600 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio, part of the National Digital Newspaper Program developed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, enables the Ohio History Connection to digitize 100,000 additional Ohio newspaper pages published from 1836 to 1921 by August 2014. These pages will join the 40 other papers — more than 200,000 Ohio newspaper pages published between 1845 and 1922 — that are already available on Chronicling America through the project’s first and second of three phases. This is welcome news to blurry-eyed researchers and genealogists who scour old microfilm in search of clues to history’s mysteries and family histories.
“Through this program, the Ohio History Connection is making it easy for Ohioans to access their history through the pages of local newspapers,” said Jenni Salamon, Project Coordinator for the National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio at the Ohio History Connection. “Professional and family researchers and history enthusiasts can now search Ohio newspapers by using someone’s name, hometown or military regiment.”

The Ohio newspapers added to Chronicling America are: from Carrollton, Carroll Free Press, 1836, 1841-1858; from Jackson, Jackson Standard, 1853-1858, 1866-1888 and Jackson Daily Standard, 1873-1874, 1880-1881; from Lower Sandusky and Fremont, Lower Sandusky Freeman, 1849-1849, Freeman, 1849-1850, and Fremont Weekly Freeman, 1850-1853; from Napoleon, Democratic Northwest, 1881-1894 and Democratic Northwest and Henry County News, 1894-1897; and from Plymouth, Plymouth Advertiser, 1853-1855.

For a full listing of Ohio historical newspapers, visit http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/ohio.

Archived Newspapers Available at Ohio History Center

The Ohio History Connection’s Archives/Library at the Ohio History Center in Columbus contains the largest collection of Ohio newspapers in existence. The newspaper holdings contain newspapers published from 1793 to present, 4,500 titles, 20,000 volumes, and over 50,000 rolls of microfilm of Ohio titles.

Much of the microfilm in the Society’s newspaper collection was created in 1971 as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities initiative called the United States Newspaper Program. Since then, the information published in the thousands of deteriorating wood-pulp newspaper volumes in the society’s collections has been transferred to more than 16,000 rolls of master negative microfilm. The National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio builds upon this earlier effort.