Thomas MacEntee recently wrote about Newspaper Finder, a new website to help find newspapers in any of 32 databases. These include databases that are freely available (such as Chronicling America) and those behind a paywall (such as Oldnews.com, newspapers.com, etc.).
The founders of Newspaper Finder were frustrated with the process of locating newspapers for genealogy research because of the many different databases available. Now, instead of going database by database, users simply search by place/date range and Newspaper Finder shows all the newspapers available, organized by source. Here is a closeup of the databases covered by the search:
As noted on the search page, you can filter out certain databases (maybe you don't want to see results from fee-based databases, indicated by $). Maybe you want to exclude databases that are clearly outside the geographical area. You can also use the date range to narrow the search to avoid having too many results.
Example of a search and mapped result is at top. Here, I searched all databases for newspapers from Upper Sandusky, Ohio, between 1850 and 1980. My husband's grandma Floyda Steiner was from this area and I wanted to see more news items about her.
Up popped a map of Ohio with pins for various cities in that area. By clicking on the Upper Sandusky pin, I could see the names of the newspapers, the dates, and which database has each. Also I looked at other pins nearby, such as Bucyrus, because I know newspapers sometimes had overlapping coverage.
If only I could click to go directly to each newspaper in the list...but at least now I know where to look. Easy and useful! Give it a try.
