Newspapers provide some of the best sources for genealogical and historical research, and now in the Internet era more of them are accessible in various formats than ever before.
Georgia newspapers have been indexed and abstracted over the past century, starting with the Works Progress Administration index to the Savannah papers done in the 1930s, found at the Georgia Archives and elsewhere.
Tad Evans, Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, Faye Stone Poss and many others have continued to abstract newspapers from across the state, with many of these publications underwritten by the R.J. Taylor Foundation. The most complete collection of these abstracts is at the Georgia Archives.
The University of Georgia's Galileo program has many Georgia newspapers digitized online and easily searchable, including those for Atlanta, Columbus, Macon and Milledgeville, as well as UGA's The Red and Black and Atlanta's Southern Israelite.
GenealogyBank, a subscription site, has newspapers available from all over the nation as well as obituaries since the 1970s online. The Gale Corp. has put many newspapers online in collections usually found at college or university libraries because of their cost. Emory University also has two large databases of British newspapers, including the Burney Collection for the 18th century.
The Library of Congress has a number of U. S. newspapers available for free on its Chronicling America site. Other newspapers, including many decades of The Atlanta Constitution, can be found on Footnote.com and Ancestry.com.
And if you can't find them online, remember UGA has the Georgia Newspaper Collection on microfilm, as well as some newspapers from other states. Most college libraries have some out-of-state papers on microfilm.
There are also hidden treasures, such as the Decatur Library, which has the Charleston newspaper on microfilm from the 1730s to the 1850s, as well as Civil War-era newspapers from Macon.
Wherever you find newspapers, they are a goldmine.
Pennsylvania sources
If you have interest in Pennsylvania genealogical research, check out the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania's website, www.genpa.org. They have a newsletter and a journal, and recently featured the Pennsylvania records being put on www.familysearch.org, including the Philadelphia death records index. The society's website also offers details of the First Families of Pennsylvania lineage society.
Special websites
Friends have reported good results in using www.myheritage.com as well as www.geneanet.com, where I recently found a Frenchman who posted a family tree for emigres from Haiti to Savannah and then back to France. Join for free and see what you can find.
