Fantastic Find: Free Digitized Newspapers!

Taxpayer dollars at work!

I subscribe to some great online newpaper databases (Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and GenealogyBank), and was already aware of the free Chronicling America newspaper project from the Library of Congress, but I just found another great place to look if the above sources don't get you what you need: The U.S. Newspaper Program page (National Endowment for the Humanities).

The fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands each have a page with that state or territories digitization efforts, including newspapers.  I had already used the California and Oregon versions without processing that it was part of a larger national program.

For example, looking in the Oklahoma digitized newspapers, I finally found a few more clues about my husband's 2nd great grandmother, Louise (Malcha) Buchholz.  The last record I found for her or husband Ernest August Buchholz was in 1905 in Kansas.  Her daughters Dora and Ida lived or married in the Dewey, Washington, Oklahoma area between 1907 and 1911, yet I couldn't find Louise anywhere on a census.  I just assumed that Louise and Ernest had probably died before 1910.

But lo! The Bartlesville, Oklahoma, newspapers was actually online and digitized, which I haven't found anywhere else.

Here and here are links for this wanted ad

She would have been 48, and she was born in Germany. So now I know that she lived until at least June 1910, and that Ernest had either died before then, or they were at least separated by then.  That's more than I knew before!

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