Chronicling America Newspaper Database

Chronicling America is a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress .[1]

In total, almost 9.5 million pages of digitized newspapers are currently available view. One of the most useful features on the website is the US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present. This database contains information for over 153,000 newspapers that were published in the U.S. since the 17^th century. You can use many different filter options to search the database, one of which is ethnicity. Using the ‘Irish’ option gives a return of 127 titles. The majority of the titles are from the state of New York, however, in total, newspapers from 16 states are listed. They are:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia

The span of years and cities they cover range from the brief to the broad. Some interesting examples include:

The Irish Pennsylvanian (Pittsburg, PA), 1890-1921

The Northwestern Standard (Minneapolis, MN), 1885-1886

The A.O.H. Journal (Richmond, VA), 1878-1881

Just one of these 127 newspapers is digitized and available to view on the website. It is the Kentucky Irish American and you can search editions from 1898-1921.

Chronicling America website

US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present

List of ethnic Irish newspapers in the directory

You can read other blog posts about newspapers relevant to Irish genealogy research by selecting the ‘newspaper’ label at the end of this post.

---

[1] Chroniclingamerica.gov. About Chronicling America. Year Unknown. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about: accessed 5 May 2015.