The Elgin County Archives has digitized microfilmed newspapers, dating back more than 100 years, after receiving a $7,000 grant last summer from the Elgin County Branch of Ontario Ancestors. They are now available online for the public.
The county is located south of London, Ontario. Its most populated municipalities are Aylmer, Port Stanley, Belmont, Dutton, West Lorne, and St. Thomas.
The newspapers available to search online are:
- Aylmer Enterprise (1869-1870)
- Aylmer Express (1881-1948)
- Aylmer Saturday Night (1914)
- Aylmer Sun (1890-1914)
- East Elgin Tribune (1915-1916)
- Dutton Advance (1890-1949)
- Dutton Enterprise (1881-1949)
- Rodney Chronicle (1885)
- Rodney Mercury (1887-1918)
- Weekly Dispatch (1853-1876)
- The Home Journal/Canadian Home Journal (1859-1877)
- West Lorne Sun (1902-1918)
Individual newspapers can be searched by entering the name of the newspaper and the year you are looking for, or you can use the advanced search option, entering the name of the newspaper and then sorting by electronic records.
I struggled at first, thinking only one issue appears at a time because I couldn’t find the others. The problem was my lack of patience. (My blog could easily have been called The Impatient Genealogist.) During a third attempt, I realized that it takes two or three minutes to upload the PDF that contains an entire year of a particular newspaper.
If I had first read the short and easy to follow instructions, called Search Examples, in the announcement, instead of diving blindly into my search, I would have saved myself some time.
Despite its clean, modern look, I find the website slow. Even my high-speed internet and laptop sometimes timed out, waiting for the website to load.
Good news and bad news
The bad news is keyword searches are not possible within the newspaper collection. You need to browse issue by issue and page by page.
The good news is you can look at the microfilm images online instead of going to a library or archival centre.
Visit the Elgin County Archives website to do a quick or advanced search for newspapers. While there, enter a family name in the search box to see if anything besides newspapers turns up, such as photos. (If the hyperlink to the website doesn’t work, try it a second or third time. As I wrote above, the site can be slow and lead to a timed out or error page.)
