MyHeritage announced today that it is launching OldNews.com, a new website that offers access to thousands of historical newspapers, mostly from the 1800s and 1900s. The site includes articles from major international newspapers to small town magazines and newspapers. Its search engine allows you to quickly find information about a person, topic or event. OldNews is a subscription service that costs $99 per year and offers a 7-day free trial.
The site allows genealogists, educators, researchers and history buffs to search for articles about people and events throughout history. OldNews can be used to discover stories about your ancestors or gain deeper knowledge about different moments in history. You can browse news headlines, birth and wedding announcements, obituaries, sports and culture, lifestyle news, advertising and more. MyHeritage will add millions more newspaper pages every month.
At launch, the site includes newspapers from publications in the US, Canada, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands, and Australia. The company says millions of newspaper pages are added every month and that it plans to add content from other countries in the future. OldNews is available in 11 languages including English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
News content was processed using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and enhanced with algorithms developed in-house by MyHeritage.
“Our team has scoured the world, working with libraries and archives, collecting together the best of the world’s history,” Myko Clelland, MyHeritage’s Director of Content in Europe, said in an emailed statement. “After the digitization process, we applied our innovative proprietary new visual character recognition and AI language modeling process to the printed material. This then gave us an accurate, best-in-class text database exclusive to OldNews that can be searched and matched using names, dates, locations and keywords.”
After you search for a person or topic, the site will show you a zoomed-in thumbnail of articles that highlight the terms from your search. The terms will remain highlighted if you choose to view a full article. You can print the document or download it to your computer. MyHeritage plans to release additional browsing features in the coming months, such as the ability to save and share newspaper clippings.
MyHeritage notes that since you didn’t have to be famous to appear in the newspaper in the past, anyone could be found in them, making historical newspapers valuable to genealogists, historians and educators. They are also valuable to the average person. For example, you can try to find the marriage announcements of your grandparents or great-grandparents using their names and the year they married.
“Historical newspapers contain a wealth of information and provide an unparalleled level of detail about the past,” MyHeritage CEO and founder Gilad Japhet said in a press release. “We’re building OldNews.com to serve as our hub for historic newspapers, with a strong content offering. This release is just the beginning. we have an incredible array of additional content and features, and ambitious plans to make OldNews.com the number one online repository of international historical newspapers beyond the English-speaking world.”
The launch of the new website comes at a time when news agencies are also closing their content being removed from their websites, deleting access to thousands of news articles and features from the last few decades. Given the importance of preserving news content, the launch of OldNews is a nice way to celebrate journalism while ensuring easy access to important historical reports.
