Newspapers are for News!

So, I was bouncing around the internet trying to do some research for a client in Arkansa and I ran into an interesting "Brick Wall Buster".

On the www.familysearch.org  website they have Research Wiki's for every state. As I was looking around the Arkansas Birth, Marriage & Death (BMD) page  I found a section called "Substitute Records"

Substitute Records has links to websites that have church records, cemetery indexes, and other links of interest.  On this particular Wiki that have a listing for the Library of Congress website that lists what libraries have what newspapers. I had no idea such an index existed. I seem to always spend a great deal of time emailing different libraries and searching their websites to see what newspapers they have.

The Library of Congress has done it for us: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/

A quick check of their search power for the simple term of Somerville Journal (Somerville, Massachusetts local newspaper) returns a 4,735,315 page search of all newspapers published between 1690 and 2012. It returned 4 hits. Three for Somerville, MA and one for Somerville, TN.

The Library of Congress index is Fast, Easy to use and looks to be fairly Accurate! Which meets all of my minimum requirements!