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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Exploring Historical Newspapers with Newspaper Finder – An Interview with Mitchell Lewis and Matt Wheeler
00:28:14
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Family Tree Magazine podcast. This is the show from America's number one genealogy magazine. I'm Andrew Cook, editor of Family Tree magazine. Historical newspapers are a uniquely valuable resource for genealogical information. Thanks to advancements in technology, they're easier than ever to search. And the largest genealogy websites are racing to add more and more newspapers to their collections. In fact, there are now so many newspapers online and so many databases holding them that it can be hard to know where to look. A new website called Newspaper Finder has catalog the collections at sites like Newspapers.com and Genealogy bank, creating one central database that family historians can use to find titles that are relevant to their research. I'm joined today by the site's founders, Mitchell Lewis and Matthew Wheeler. Welcome to the podcast.
- [00:46]
B
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [00:48]
C
Thanks for having us.
- [00:50]
B
So, yeah, just introducing Newspaper Finder real quick. Just like you mentioned, it's essentially a database for digitized newspapers. There are a lot of newspaper sites out there like newspapers.com, newspaper archive, Gmail, and a lot of these sites kind of exist in isolation, and researchers are kind of left guessing where to look for the papers they need for the lines in their family tree. So, you know, the hardest part of newspaper research isn't searching, it's knowing where to search. And Newspaper Finder is really just intended to solve that problem for people.
- [01:27]
A
Yeah, you're right. A lot of the top tools don't speak nicely with each other. In fact, some of them are competitors. And so having some kind of tool to stitch together the different databases and give people one place to look, you know, geographically, for newspapers that their ancestors might be in, it's sort of. I think our listeners might be familiar with WorldCat, which is kind of a similar service for libraries and archives, or maybe Percy, the Periodical Source Index that does something similar for publications. Would you say that's an apt comparison?
- [02:03]
B
Yeah, I think it's a great metaphor. Just like WorldCat is kind of a catalog of libraries and their holdings, Newspaper finder is basically WorldCat for digitized newspapers. And just like WorldCat, Newspaper Finder is also free, so we're not charging customers to show them where the repositories exist.
- [02:24]
A
Yeah, free service. And I think it's worth mentioning that some of these are subscription databases. So you might not be able to search the newspapers themselves when you get to the site. But still like having the one click access. You know, I went in, a lot of my ancestors are in Cincinnati, so I just drilled down to that place. I click Cincinnati, and here's a whole list, I mean, dozens of newspapers at all the different databases with one click after that, I'm on newspapers.com at that, you know, a search field for exactly that publication.
- [03:02]
B
And I'm only one of the founders of newspaperfinder.com. mitchell Lewis here is one of the others. So, Mitch, want to introduce yourself real quick?
- [03:10]
C
Yes, yes, Mitchell Lewis. I'm a Certified genealogist with BCG and currently a PhD student at George Washington University. I do want to say on your last point, one of the things about having free providers in our database and subscription based services like Newspapers.com or Genealogy bank is if you click on Cincinnati, let's say you'll find that the same exact newspaper that you're looking for on newspapers.com might be available on Google News Archive or maybe it's available on Advantage Archives. And those are free services. So you can actually get around having to pay for some of these services just by finding out where this newspaper, what other digital copies may exist on free services. And that's been a real benefit.
- [04:01]
A
That's a great point and underscores again that these databases don't talk to each other ordinarily. And if I'm a subscription website, I don't want you to know that you can get the same newspaper titles somewhere else for free. What inspired you to take on this project and what kind of problems do you hope that it will solve for genealogists?
- [04:21]
C
Well, I can give you a little bit of background about how this all got started. It was about three years ago. I have been doing genealogy for about 15 years now and I've researched some of my ancestral hometowns for many, many years. And it was about three years ago that I found one of the nearby town's newspapers, the Greensburg Daily Tribune. I found it on Google News Archive and for a decade I had just not known that this newspaper existed. It had literally just been lying there in plain sight and it completely opened up just a whole bunch of new newspaper articles, obituaries, things that I didn't even know were online. Just because it was hidden behind Google News Archive. Right. My intuition is to just jump to newspapers.com, see what's available, and if it's not there, it's not there. Maybe I'll check Newspaper Archive or Genealogy Bank. So that sort of prompted this question is, you know, can we gather all these newspapers online and put it in a central location for people to find? I thought originally that this wasn't going to be possible. So I brought it up to Matt and Matt's like, yeah, this is a fantastic idea. I pretty much said, look, I don't think the technology is going to work. I don't think we have the ability to do so. Then a week later, Matt sends me a file and he goes, here you go. Here's five databases I was able to gather data from. Then we're like, okay, now we can really start exploring. We can see what we can do here.
- [05:53]
A
The manual way of doing this, I guess, would be looking at each website's card catalog. I imagine your data input is different since that would take quite a long time. And what kind of compatibility do you need to have with these website to be able to do that?
- [06:09]
B
So this tool is basically just pulling data that these sites are already sharing directly. So we're not pulling any kind of proprietary information. The data that Newspaper Finder hosts is the same data that you would see by browsing the site manually. We've just consolidated it into this single place.
- [06:29]
C
I will say there is a few major exceptions where there are a lot of providers which do not give location information. So that has probably been one of our biggest hurdles that we've had to overcome. You go to newspapers.com, you go to Genealogy bank, the big providers will give you a location. So they'll say, this paper was published in Cincinnati, let's say. But for example, Google News Archive, the Internet Archive, Fulton History we had some trouble with as well. A lot of these websites do not provide location information. So Google News Archive, I had painstakingly went through each paper looking at those banner headlines and picking out what those locations are. And so to some regard, we are one, if not the first, database to actually catalog Google News Archive. So we actually know what's hiding. There's 2,000 papers in Google News Archive, and that was very painstaking to go through. But in general, to Matt's point, we really are able to just gather the information from these websites from what they already show and tell us.
- [07:35]
B
And Mitch actually kind of brings up a great point in that most of these newspaper sites don't give you a true kind of geographic sense of coverage. They give you dropdowns. So you pick a specific city and if nothing turns up, you're stuck. There's nothing in that ecosystem that says, try these nearby towns. That's where the coverage existed. Unless you know the area, you're guessing. It's kind of a flaw in kind of modern UI design, because newspapers didn't operate in these kind of neat municipal silos. They served regions.
- [08:13]
A
Yes, that's interesting. And I noticed when I was looking at Cincinnati, that it was a pinpoint. And also in like the general Cincinnati metro area, there was Western hills, which is sort of its own thing in the Cincinnati suburban area. But my ancestors for sure would have been serviced by those newspapers as well. And there were some unique titles there. So yeah, it gives you a better sense for what's going on, even if it's not just in the city as such that you expect to find your ancestors in. And because you have been working with all these different websites, I think you have kind of a unique perspective on the big sites and their strengths, their weaknesses. What observations have you had about the sites either as standalone resources or as compared with each other?
- [09:06]
B
Mitch, you want to take that one?
- [09:08]
C
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, there's a number of differences between each other. You know, if you compare, you know, going back to, let's say Google News Archive is like one of my go tos, There's a lot of these that really just exist, not even in the ecosystem of the one database, but they're isolated among thousands of different newspapers. You know, newspapers.com, some of the bigger websites are much more organized. I'm sure that some of our listeners have experienced Fulton history before and it's an invaluable resource, but it is very hard to navigate that site sometimes. And so, you know, really there's a difference of geographic coverage between these newspapers. You know, we find a really big international audience with sites like Old News or Newspaper archive. Whereas like newspapers.com is more focused on the United States. The British Newspaper Archive obviously focused on the British Isles. Matt, do you have anything else to add to there?
- [10:13]
B
Yeah, actually a couple days ago I did kind of some interesting analysis on our data set. So a couple interesting figures here. Just under half of many newspapers that are digitized online have less than two years of coverage. Like for a lot of newspapers that are digitized online, the median coverage is four years. And actually only 9% of newspapers digitized online have over 50 years of coverage. And that kind of expresses a larger point here in that most newspapers aren't archives. They're kind of fragments that are scattered across providers. So the problem isn't necessarily find in newspapers, it's understanding what actually exists, where it exists and how complete it is.
- [11:06]
C
Right. And adding to that point, Matt, sometimes you'll find the exact same paper between two different databases with two different year spans. So you can click a town, let's say, and you'll see Old News Advantage archives, newspapers.com, they might have the exact same Year span, they're sourcing those digital copies from some type of archive. But then you'll see some other database that goes 10 years earlier, that goes into the 1880s instead of starting in the 1890s, let's say. And I mean, that's such a valuable resource to be able to see. Well, you know, I've been searching newspapers.com for this, but there's another 10, 20 years of information that's been hiding on this other website.
- [11:47]
A
And that's something, too, that genealogists have to look at in a bunch of different record collections. Sure, it says it goes from this year to this year, but what it's not telling you is how complete is the coverage for those years. They probably are just taking here's when the first record is, and here's when the last record is. And you have to do some digging to figure out, okay, but does it include this county, and does it include this span of years? And in this case, does it include all the years of publication? And that also, I think, reflects the history of newspaper publication in this country, which was not always super clean. It was sort of messy. Publications would start and then stop and then change names, and then you'd have newspapers by the same. Multiple newspapers by the same name. So it can be kind of a thorny thing to study, but this tool tries to provide a more consistent timeline. One other piece of data that I thought was interesting, I think it was on a recent blog post, you shared that number of newspaper titles by provider, and Advantage Archives was outpacing every site by a lot, like maybe by twice as much. Can you talk a little bit about what Advantage Archives is and why that number, why so many papers seem to be coming from there?
- [13:06]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Advantage Archives is much different than your traditional newspaper database when you think newspapers.com, genealogy, bank, old news, the biggest newspaper databases are for profit, that they're actively looking for papers to digitize to then host on their platform. Advantage Archives operates in a completely different way. They are a platform for local libraries, communities, historical societies, for them to take the initiative, for them to digitize their newspapers and their library. So this was not expected. When we did our last update, I found this very surprising, and I think it really does reflect how the genealogical community, the library communities, that they're really interested in getting this stuff out there, that this is really valuable to researchers. So, I mean, yeah, it's really, really, really kind of surprised me there.
- [14:07]
A
We publish a list of the 75 best websites for US research every year. And so as I'm working on that, I often, you know, I'm in the Georgia Virtual Vault and Ohio Memory and all these kind of state specific resources and they're all so different and they're also some of them are really forthcoming about what records they have and some aren't. So that the Newspaper Finder is able to grab those that are hosted by Advantage Archives and put them in one place really helps you search across all those sort of disparate, smaller, not always intuitive collections and websites. So as we're talking, it's late April 2026 and you officially launched the site just a few weeks ago. How has been going? What kind of feedback have you gotten so far?
- [14:58]
B
Well, the initial plan was to keep Newspaper Finder quiet and just collect feedback from a couple kind of people in the genealogical ecosystem. But Mitch has a fun story about this.
- [15:10]
C
Well, so I went to Rootstech this year back in March and I really, we've been in development for a number of years. There was always things that we wanted to change and add. But I kind of spread the word a little bit about it at RootsTech for what Matt said. I wanted to get some feedback, kind of wanted to see if, you know, there were comments, questions, how we can make the site better before we go ahead and like officially launch. But as we were sort of, Matt and I were touching base after RootsTech, there was a video published, I believe it was the formidable genealogist who put out an Instagram reel about our website. And then like the next day it just absolutely took off. I mean, I think we went from like an average of like 30 or 40 viewers per day. And then the next day we were hitting like 1500. So that sort of put us on like, okay, we really need to like wrap up, you know, put on the finishing touches and you know, announce this to the community.
- [16:13]
A
Definitely a ready, fire, aim kind of situation there where the cat's out of the bag. And. But yeah, I think, and I know I kind of keep fawning on the site here, but I think part of why genealogists had that reaction even to just, you know, an Instagram post, that there's such a clear value here that it makes people want to jump on that right away.
- [16:38]
B
I think it solves a really, a really big problem in the ecosystem that a lot of different people have. And like you mentioned earlier, the individual newspaper providers aren't really incentivized to tell you what their competition has. They don't want to send you to another revenue generating site. They kind of Prefer to keep you in their own ecosystem.
- [17:00]
A
Exactly. Well, if you guys have some time, would you mind walking us through the site?
- [17:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [17:09]
A
For our audio listeners, we'll try to narrate what's going on, but you can also hop over to our YouTube page to see the video version of this interview, which will include the actual screen capture.
- [17:18]
B
So, yeah, for our audio listeners, we're currently looking at the homepage of newspaperfinder.com we have a search option in the upper right corner where you can search by a time range starting with a start year and an end year. So I will search 1850-1900, and I'll tell newspaper finder to search all of the databases in our collection. And here I can limit results by country. So here I've limited it to the United States. And instead of searching all states, I'm just going to search Pennsylvania here. So I click search and I can immediately see a large collection of papers in Pennsylvania. So I can zoom in to this map and select any one of these pointers here to see where to see what newspapers exist for this specific area. And I can also search by a specific location here. So I'll type in, for example, Minersville, Pennsylvania. And right here in Minersville, Pennsylvania, we see nothing. But this is where the kind of value of seeing an actual map comes through. If I zoom out just slightly here, I can actually see the ecosystem of newspapers that was serving this area of Miners Real, Pennsylvania. So while there may not be any papers for miners real specifically here we see papers in nearby Pottsville, Schuylkill Haven and Shenandoah. And the great thing that this tool provides is it not just tells you where these newspapers existed, but also answers the question for this place in a specific time frame, was there any likelihood of actually funding a newspaper here at all? So towards the kind of west side here, we can see that there isn't much newspaper coverage. And as we get closer to the city, that coverage continues to expand.
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A
It's an interesting point. Sort of reflects the social history of the areas and the settlement patterns.
- [19:41]
B
Yep.
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A
And again, for our audio listeners, even when Matt scrolled out a little bit, dozens of more red pushpins popped up. That's showing, hey, here are all the surrounding communities with newspapers somewhere in these databases. So really important to search around. And this tool makes it easy to do that.
- [19:59]
B
And another interesting thing you can look at here is kind of the longitudinal history in an area. So, for example, I can search a year.
- [20:07]
C
I think you're only in Philadelphia there. There's only two newspapers.
- [20:11]
B
Yep. But, yeah, in 1776, there's only two papers in or two locations in Philadelphia that are publishing newspapers. But if I expand this out to the 1860s, for instance, the coverage just explodes. So seeing that kind of coverage across time can also be really interesting and have research implications as well.
- [20:34]
A
Yeah. One thing that I think a lot of people will be familiar with is looking for obituaries. And we often tell people, if, you know, when the death was, try to look at multiple publications, not just the most obvious one. And so this would help you do that. All right. My ancestor died in 1865. Well, let me type this in. Here are all the newspapers that were being published at the time. These could all be candidates for finding an obituary. If you're having a hard time.
- [20:59]
B
And even going back to my previous point, talking about how newspapers have dropdowns, a lot of those kind of search options tend to box you into specific counties. Like, you'll search Pennsylvania and then Schuylkill County. But going back to my earlier point about the kind of distribution network and ecosystem of these newspapers, a lot of these newspapers also cross county boundaries. And you'll see that really evident on this map as well.
- [21:27]
A
And there are a lot of peculiarities there, too. I think that Kansas City, for example, is Kansas City in Missouri or is Kansas City in Kansas, depending on where the newspaper's publishing office was. How does it get mapped when you're kind of overly simplifying that way?
- [21:46]
C
Yeah, you're hinting at one of the major struggles about undergoing this type of project, which is the geocoding, because we can get a location from, let's say, newspapers.com, genBank. But how do you turn that location into, you know, a latitude and longitude? And sometimes the location you receive from the provider actually doesn't even come back to any location at all. So, for example, if you were to search Kansas from 1870 to 1900, there's a lot of ghost towns that had newspapers, and those towns don't even exist. So if Matt goes ahead and searches for Kansas and let's say 1870 to 1890, for example, this is sort of the boom era of towns starting to develop in Kansas. And if you zoom into some of those red dots, you could even find some of these pointers that aren't even on a town. You'll kind of have to hunt for it, but you'll see where. We've had to figure out where, you know, Springtown, Kansas is. If you Google that, there is no Springtown, Kansas. But if we Go back in the county historical maps. It's just a made up name, just as an example. I don't, I can't remember any off the top of my head. But you know, we would get a town name and I mean I would be digging through the county historical books and I'd have to find like there you go, for example, Decatur Center, Kansas. It's on, it looks like it's on a farm, but that town was there. We were able to reference these old maps and you'll see Decatur Center, Kansas in those old maps. And then we'll sort of have to kind of triangulate where that is based on these other towns nearby. I mean this, this was one of the major, major undertaking for Newspaper Finder.
- [23:36]
A
It almost makes it a kind of gazetteer that way that you're tracing the history of a place.
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C
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean one of the first observations, I was showing this to a friend of mine and I just said, have him sir. You don't have to do this Matt, because it's gonna be, it'll explode the map. But if you just search like 1500-20, 26 in the United States, just let's just see every single paper that exists. Immediately you can see there's this massive bubble of points in like the Midwest, like Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa. He's like, what is going on here? He's like, there's just so it's just this massive blob of red points and it's all because these old ghost towns, all these towns trying to buy for that county seat and those that didn't survive don't exist anymore.
- [24:27]
A
Or towns that were originally along a rail line that isn't there anymore and had some prominence then because of that, but maybe not 150 years later.
- [24:39]
C
Yeah, absolutely. That as well. Yeah.
- [24:43]
A
Well, what's next for you in Newspaper Finder? What tools are you trying to add? What's the next step in the site's evolution?
- [24:54]
B
Yeah, so we're continually adding more newspaper sources. We actually just added to last night there were up to 34 sources in the Newspaper Finder system. Obviously we can continue adding sources forever, but the real goal is to kind of become the default endpoint for searching here. So before someone goes to genealogy bank or newspapers.com or newspaper archive, they go to Newspaper Finder to see where should I actually look for the research area and the time frame.
- [25:28]
A
I'm interested in some more coverage in terms of publications. Right now the database is more US focused. Mostly US focused.
- [25:39]
B
Not really. Actually we do have 115 countries outside the US so the coverage is by no means US centric.
- [25:49]
C
I will add though, that I would say the overwhelming amount of papers do come from a limited selection of countries. So for example, the United States, Canada, the British Isles, Australia, France, and I think that there's a lot to say there. I think there is a certain bias in one. A lot of these subscription services are based in the United States or based in the United Kingdom, and so it's much easier for them to obtain and digitize copies that are near them. But there's plenty of different national databases. For example, I was looking at, there's the Estonian archive for newspapers is massive. We've been trying to work with delfer, which is the national newspaper archive for the Netherlands. These are things to come. We have 34 databases and we're continuing to add day by day.
- [26:45]
A
How can our listeners keep up with what's going on at Newspaper Finder?
- [26:51]
B
So we did recently publish a blog. We have a couple posts one about our official launch and our our update this month. And yeah, if folks are interested, they're more than happy to check out our blog. You're more than welcome to contact us or leave any comments on a blog entry. And yeah, we have been engaging with the community here as well. Always make a point to answer any inquiries we receive. Very attentive to any suggestions about data providers. And yeah, we hope people enjoy using it and find it useful.
- [27:27]
A
And we'll link to the blog in the Show Notes as well as a tutorial that we put together ourselves. Our editorial staff Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Congratulations on launching this really interesting and useful tool and we wish you all the best.
- [27:43]
C
Thank you for having us. Andrew,
- [27:47]
A
thanks for joining me in this month's episode of the Family Tree Magazine Podcast. You can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes@familytreemagazine.com podcast while on our website. You can also sign up for our free email newsletter where you'll receive free genealogy resources each weekday, including links to new podcast episodes as they're released. Until next time, have fun climbing your family tree.