Newspapers
So many services and very little overlap. And then there are those little surprises that will break the bank.
My research experience is with United States newspapers, with the occasional Canadian newspaper. Please share your knowledge about other resources either in the comments or as a tip.
Subscriptions
Newspapers.com
Many have been frustrated with the Basic subscription. Basic gives you access to older, public-domain newspapers. Publisher Extra has more recent papers. Only Publisher Extra can be given as a gift subscription —$99.99 for six months. Basic costs $59.99 for six months. It might be worth the hour drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to use their subscription a couple of times a year.
Hmmm. $9.44 for gas. Up to $3 for parking. It might make more sense to sign up for a month at $19.90 a few times each year. See Newspapers.com’s plan comparison. The Publisher Extra seems to include Australia, Canada, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Poland, Samoa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I recommend you check the availability before subscribing. Poland has about seventeen years.
MyHeritage
I like MyHeritage for colorizing photos and accessing their newspapers. While I’ve found some good newspaper articles, in 2024, MyHeritage created OldNews.com, which put many of the sources I want behind another paywall.
For $399 a year, you can have access to everything, or for $99 a year, you can have access to just OldNews.com. But the good news is that it includes papers from the 1800s and 1900s and “includes newspapers from across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Austria, Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, and Australia.”
Now I’ll tell you a little secret. You can’t see the newspaper article using your MyHeritage subscription without the OldNews.com upgrade, but the search return gives you enough information that you might be able to find the original at one of the free sites.
And if you don’t have a MyHeritage account, again, some public libraries have it.
GenealogyBank
I joined GenealogyBank during one of their sales and ended up with them for a second year because of the automatic renewal. The regular subscription price is $99.90 per year. The papers range from 1690 to today, but are limited to the United States. Over those two years, I found many articles that pertained to my research. GenealogyBank would be my favorite site, except for their use restrictions.
I contacted them for clarification about their policy, and I was told I’m allowed to use the information from their site for my personal and my client’s personal use only. So I would find the information through GenealogyBank, and then I’d go and find the information somewhere else.
GenealogyBank is owned by NewsBank, which the library in one town over subscribes to. I foresee visiting them a couple of times a year.
And More
And there are other sites, such as Newspaper Archives and ProQuest, which are available at some public libraries.
Free Sites
Local Newspaper Projects
I am constantly reading about newspaper projects around the country, but I haven’t been tracking them. Google to see if there is one in your area of research.
One I use quite often is NYS Historic Newspapers. They have newspapers for Saratoga from 1854 to 1923. I found many articles that included my family.
The Library of Congress
Once you have the information about the article, you might be able to find the image at the Library of Congress’s website.
Google News Newspaper Archive
Google had a project to upload old newspapers, but then gave it up. However, you can still access what was uploaded. I’ve gotten lucky and found what I needed many times.
Public Library
My public library has digital images of the local English paper from 1869 to 1952, and the local French paper from 1898 to 1964. They also have microfilms which contain newspaper images not digitally available. And the microfilm reader is not like the ones I used at the Family History Library; this one can save the image to my flash drive, email it to me, or send a copy to the printer.
For my town, the digital images are part of Community History Archive. Some libraries require a library card to access the database from your home; mine is one of the ones that does not.
FamilySearch
Check the card catalog and the full-text search, and you’ll find newspaper articles. Most of the ones I’ve found, when you click on the little i for information about the source, say it is coming from NewsBank. Remember from above, NewsBank/GenealogyBank has a strict use policy, so I would not copy the image regardless of the age of the article, but I will create a link so my Substack readers can go view it at FamilySearch.
Elephid
Elephid was not on my radar, and I’ve seen better search engines, but for free, I’m not going to complain.
The British Newspaper Archive
Find My Past is a subscription site, but the newspaper archive is free.
I Love Libraries
Did you notice that all five newspaper subscriptions I mentioned, I also found at libraries? I often use these sites for their search engines. Once I find the article, I look for the newspaper at a free site or get a copy from the library where the paper circulated. I find the reference librarians won’t do research, but they will look up and send me a copy of an article if I know the paper, date, page, and article title, and I include the column number if I know it.
Call for Contributors
Why should we all have to learn the hard way? Please share what you’ve learned. Email me at YourFamilyQuest@gmail.com
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Tuesday, 17 February 2026 at 11:30 am/2:30 pm (PST/EST) ACPL Genealogy Center: Reimagining Family History Storytelling
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Great article, Deborah! Another great hint is to check state archives, university libraries and even other state's newspaper projects. Just like manuscripts, you never know where a set of historic newspapers is going to end up! And ask a librarian, they may know where there are microfilmed newspapers that are hiding in the back! And once in a while, you get lucky and a newspaper in a surrounding area had a slow news day, and they will have republished articles from other papers, too! :) The struggle is real, but sometimes the searching makes it that much more fun when you find one.
Ugh. The cost and frustration of accessing newspaper archives is real. My best resource has been the Minnesota Newspaper Hub (MNHS website) for finding small town and weekly newspapers. Not every newspaper has yet been digitized, but the ongoing efforts to do so make it the best free source I have found.