More Newspaper Links Added to Wikipedia Page

I was stunned when I discovered I had not written about new links on the Wikipedia newspaper archives page since last December.  It has been on my list of things to do, but somehow it kept slipping further down the list.  I'm glad I have caught up for a while, at least a little.  This batch has some locations with little available online, such as Kenya and Puerto Rico, plus I personally found the Belvidere newspaper obituary index very useful for my own family research.  If you're researching in Iowa, there are six new archives listed.  And all of these new links are free, just like last time!

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive on the Vanderhoof Public Library site has three digitized area newspapers.

• Ontario, Canada:  Digital Kingston has a site with newspapers going back to the early 19th century.  It overlaps with Kingston papers in the OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers Collection but has some earlier and some additional newspapers available.

• Ontario, Canada:  Thunder Bay Public Library has several downloadable PDF index files available on its site for birth/marriage/death notices, obituaries, social news, and even some World War I references for 1914.

• India:  The University of Heidelberg has digitized copies of most of the 1781 issues of Hicky's Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser.

• Israel:  Five newspapers have been added to the online holdings of the National Library of Israel, three published in Israel and two in New York.

• Kenya:  Virginia Tech hosts a digital archive of the Kenya Gazette.  Currently the collection runs from 1972–1989; plans are to digitize all issues of the Gazette, going back to the 1890's.

• Puerto Rico:  The Gazeta de Puerto-Rico has been added to the Chronicling America collection.  The date range is 1837–1893, but there are gaps.

• Arkansas:  Index to Benton Courier (Saline County) obituaries from 1930–present, downloadable as PDF files.

• California:  The San Mateo County Genealogical Society has downloadable PDF files with indices of newspaper birth/marriage/death notices and of obituaries (along with indices to various county records).

• Illinois:  The Evanston Public Library has a searchable index for the Evanston Review that currently covers 1925, 1966–1972, and 1999–2004.

• Iowa:   The Appanoose County Historical Society has an online archive of Centerville newspapers.

• Iowa:  The Monroe County Historical Society has an archive of newspapers for Albia and other locations in the county.

• Iowa:  The Museum of Danish America has digitized some Danish-American newspapers and a scrapbook.

• Iowa:  Sioux County has a second historical newspaper archive site, this one through Advantage Preservation.  The coverage is not the same as that through Newspaper Archive.

• Iowa:  Taylor County has an online collection of digitized historical newspapers ranging from 1859–2009.

• Iowa and Missouri:  O'Dell's Abstracted Newspaper Index covers southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri for 1859–2014.

• Minnesota:  The Great River Regional Library has an obituary index for the St. Cloud Times that covers 1928–2013, which is helpful, because the Times itself is available only for recent years via a ProQuest subscription database.

• New Jersey:  An index of obituaries and other death announcements has been created for the Belvidere Apollo/Intelligencer/Apollo Journal (as with many newspapers, the name changed over the years), downloadable as PDF files.  So far the index runs from 1826–1914, and the volunteer creating it plans to finish the entire run of the paper, through 1953.  I am thrilled this index is available online, because my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers published the newspaper under the Intelligencer name.  The index includes obituary listings for him, my 3rd-great-grandmother Rachel G. Sellers, my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, and a few more relatives.  (Though I unfortunately did not find a listing for Cornelius' step-brother, William/John Mathews.)  I will soon be sending a request for photocopies to the Warren County Library!

• New York:  The Troy Irish Genealogical Society has created an index of death notices appearing in Lansingburgh newspapers from 1787–1895.  It also has an index of death notices collected by the Burden Iron Company in Troy.

• Ohio:  Obituary indices for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1841–2012, downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Barberton Public Library has indices to obituaries in four local newspapers, covering 1892–1960.  They are downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Huron County library has online birth announcement and obituary indices for the Willard area.  I can't find a way to tell what years they cover.

• Oklahoma:  The Muskogee County Genealogical Society has an index to all deaths that were found in Muskogee newspapers, not just from obituaries and death notices.

• Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania State University is hosting a 1937–2014 obituary index for the Centre Daily Times.  Many years also have images.

• Pennsylvania:  The Lititz Public Library has a downloadable PDF file with an obituary index for 1877–1998 for two local newspapers.

• Rhode Island:  The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College, has been digitized from its beginning in 1935 through 1980, except for 1944–1945 (which I suspect will be added soon).

• Washington:  The Bainbridge Review 1941–1946 has been digitized and made freely available on the Kitsap Regional Library Web site.  The newspaper is significant because its publishers consistently published editorials railing against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  The project is also special because volunteers transcribed the articles instead of relying on OCR.

• United States National:  Transport Topics, the national newspaper for the trucking industry (I had no idea there was such a thing), has begun to post archival content free on its site to celebrate its 80th anniversary.

In other newspaper news, there was another sighting of a rare newspaper on Antiques Roadshow. In Charleston, West Virginia, a woman came in with issues of the 1945 Oak Ridge Journal bound in two books.  Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the town created to house people working on the Manhattan Project.  The woman's mother was the editor of the newspaper.  Looking at the paper's listing on Chronicling America, it seems that mostly a few scattered copies are known to exist, and certainly not the entire year for 1945.  As I said when a four-year run of the Confederate newspaper The Family Friend was appraised last year, how do we find this woman and convince her that these papers should be digitized and shared with others?  At least in this situation I think it's less likely she'll be tempted to turn around and sell them.

Unfortunately, I've had a negative experience recently with online newspaper listings.  I read a blog post where someone copied an entire section from the Wikipedia newspaper page, literally word for word — even including the internal Wikipedia links — and wrote about it as though it were their own work.  So many people believe that because something is on the Internet, they can just copy it and not credit where it came from.  Conveniently for the "author", the blog is not set up to accept comments.  Well, if nothing else, I consider this type of behavior a great way to learn who I would not want to work with or trust for research.