In response to the blog post, Historical Maine newspapers to be digitized, about the Maine State Library’s federal grant to digitize over 100,000 pages of historical newspapers, Peggy O’Kane from the library said the project includes collecting links to Maine newspapers that have already been digitized.
Ms. O’Kane wrote in particular about a collection of digitized newspapers that may help family historians researching their Canadian ancestors. “Canadian genealogists may be interested in the papers from Fort Fairfield, a town on the New Brunswick-Maine border.”
Nine Fort Fairfield newspapers, from 1863 to 1991, have been digitized and are available on the Digital Archives of the Fort Fairfield Public Library.
Fort Fairfield is a small town in Eastern Maine across the border from New Brunswick.
The Fort Fairfield newspaper collection is easy to search by names and keywords, by year, by publication, and by year and publication. If there is any possibility one of your ancestors lived in the Fairfield area, or across the border in New Brunswick towns, such as Aroostook, Four Falls, Perth-Andover, or further, I recommend you do a quick search.
French-language newspaper
Further to the blog post about the digitization project, one member in the Genealogy à la carte Facebook group suggested we write to the state librarian to ask that Le Messager, the state’s oldest and longest-running French-language newspaper, be included in the digitization project to reflect the French Canadian history of Maine.
