During last November’s Black Friday sales, I decided to take the plunge and buy a discounted six-month Newspapers.com subscription. Much to my surprise, I’ve been a happy researcher ever since.
With promises of adding more newspapers from Canada this year, the website now has 59 English-language Canadian newspapers, including the Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Regina Leader-Post, Winnipeg Tribune, Windsor Star, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, and Montreal Gazette.
Unfortunately, there are still no Atlantic Canada newspapers.
Two newspapers I would like to see added are the Toronto Star and Montreal Star.
While the greatest number of newspapers on the site are from the United States, the second-largest collection by far appears to be Canadian, and there are also some newspapers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Australia.
Limted-time offer
Until February 28, Newspapers.com is offering $15US off their six-month Basic and Publisher Extra subscriptions. This is an offer for new subscribers only, not for renewals.
With the $15 discount, a six-month Basic subscription is now $29.95US or about $40CDN.
A six-month, discounted Publisher Extra subscription is $59.90US or about $80CDN.
I
f you do the math, the Publisher Extra comes out to about $3CDN per week.
If still not convinced, think about this from a golfer’s perspective. Most golf balls cost at least $2 each, and golfers can easily lose two or three of them a week, without batting an eye.
I bought a Publisher Extra subscription because I wanted the full range of newspapers. The Basic subscription has a much smaller number of newspapers.
For example, the Montreal Gazette Basic subscription goes from 1857 to 1922. The Publisher Extra goes from 1857 to 2019.
Before purchasing a subscription, you can look at the list of newspapers and the years provided.
Note that your subscription will automatically renew at the regular price at the end of six months. You can, however, change the settings in your Account Details to turn off the auto-renewal.
Excellent search capability
What I especially like with Newspapers.com is how it well it functions.
It is easy to search by name and keywords and to narrow down by location, newspapers, and date.
To search for my grandfather, I put his first and last name inside quotation marks. If I don’t do that, I’d be searching for every Fred and every Dever. After exhausting those results, I search by putting his last and first name first, as in “dever fred” to make sure I don’t miss anything.
I have also made a couple of successful searches by entering the address of ancestors’ shops and residences.
Clip and save
When you find an article you want to keep, it is simple to save it as a JPG or PDF to your computer.
The clipped article or full page is automatically given a file name with the newspaper name and date.
You can also clip the article and add it to your online tree on Ancestry.
Ancestry launched Newspapers.com in 2012.
Note: I have no affiliation with Newspapers.com, beyond being a subscriber.
Your link takes me to a shoe site? I think it should have been newspapers.com not newspaper.com.
I checked both links, and they still go to where I intended, not a shoe site. Thanks for noticing the missing “s” in Newspapers in the first sentence. I’ve since corrected it.
None of these newspaper sites will ever interest me unless they provide access to the Toronto Star. Because I do not live in Toronto, I cannot get access to the Toronto Star. Apparently they were willing to take our money for about 25 years to subscribe to the Star newspaper, but because we are not Torontonians, they are unwilling to give us access — even if we are willing to pay — to the archives or ‘morgue’. I don’t understand!
I hear what you’re saying about wanting access to the Toronto Star archives. I also want to see what was once the largest English-language newspaper in Canada, the Montreal Star, digitized. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find many articles in the Montreal Gazette. I also remembered that some of my ancestors lived in cities besides Montreal and Toronto, and I found mentions of them in several other Canadian newspapers.