MyFamily Creates Historical Newspaper Database

MyFamily.com announced last week the creation of The Ancestry Historical Newspaper collection. This collection currently consists of 150,000 pages from several different newspapers from 1851 through 1923; MyFamily is planning to add twenty thousand pages a week for an eventual collection of fifty million pages. You can check it out at http://www.classicnewspapers.com/ .

This is a premium service; you can subscribe to it by itself for $69.95 a year or $24.95 quarterly. If you're already an Ancestry.com subscriber you can add this database to your subscription for $29.95 a year. If you're not a subscriber you can still view some samples; there's a sample from the front page of the New York Times available.

The page is presented as a large image framed by the viewing application (which didn't work for me in Opera 5.x but worked fine in Mozilla.) There are 11 levels of zoom, the ability to save or print the page, and three different page qualities (better page quality means longer download time, natch.) A small representation of the page in the upper right corner of the viewer keeps you oriented to where you are on the page.

I looked at the list of newspapers and wasn't too excited about the sources, but the viewer is very nicely done. I think I'll come back in three or four months and see what's been added.

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