Newspapers are the historical documents most requested by Ancestry members. 

In response to many such queries, Ancestry has recently doubled its Historical Newspaper Collection from 20 million images to 40 million images. The new newspapers come from most states and span a variety of years.

Want to know if there is a newspaper of interest to you? So many newspapers have been added that it would be impractical for me to list them all here. The easiest way to find out is to visit the Historical Newspaper Collection, scroll to the bottom of the page, click on a state of interest to you, and browse the list of papers for that state. All new papers in the collection have a red “New” label by them. 

INTERESTING FINDS
I spent a fun couple of hours browsing through papers in the collection. I found all kinds of interesting things, like juicy gossip about sordid affairs in old, small-town papers, serialized novels (novels printed in pieces, one issue at a time), and funny advertisements.

Among my favorite advertisements was “Pink Pills for Pale People”—a drug that was supposed to cure rheumatism.

Another favorite was a 1904 ad for Heurich’s beer, which promised to give “backbone” to “weak and debilitated persons, nursing mothers, and housewives who have household duties to perform.”

 
 
Really? Try running that ad today.

One of my favorite stories was about “Astrobugs”—thousands of bug astronauts catapulted into space in 1966 as part of a “Bring ‘em Back Alive” campaign. The object of the pre-Man-on-the-Moon voyage? To see if conditions in space were safe for humans. 

Another interesting read was about the common WWI practice of girls marrying their overseas boyfriends by proxy. In the story I read, one girl was married to her boyfriend by proxy only to learn later that he had been killed several weeks before their “union.” Authorities still gave her a widow’s pension. 

FAMILY HISTORY FINDS
Pink pills and astrobugs are interesting and all, but what about family history information? Of course these papers contain thousands of obituaries; birth, marriage, and death announcements; and other useful facts about family members.

Previously, I found my great-grandfather’s death notice in the 1958 copy of the Albuquerque Journal in the newspaper collection, but it wasn’t until this latest release that I found his full obituary in an additional paper that was added to the collection—the Albuquerque Tribune.

QUICK TIP
Here's a quick tip for searching the Historical Newspaper Collection.

Although the search box has a field for first and last name, you can conduct a more exact name search by putting the name of the person you’re searching for in the Keyword(s) field, surrounded by quotes—like “David Lloyd,” “David I. Lloyd,” or “David Irving Lloyd.” (Or, better yet, all three as different searches.)

This forces a search for the exact phrase/name you put between the quotes. If you use the fields for first and last names, you’ll get lots of hits on pages where both the first and last name appear on the page—but not necessarily together. You’ll also get lots of results for only fragments of the names you entered.
 

 
Search by putting the exact name you are looking for between quotation marks in the Keyword(s) field. 

This is a great collection with an amazing amount of information. Have fun searching, and good luck uncovering your ancestors’ pasts.