Indiana NewsPapers

Indiana's first newspaper, the Indiana Gazette, was published in Vincennes in 1804. The largest newspaper collections in the state are located in the Archives Division of the Indiana State Library and the Indiana University Library. For an excellent Indiana newspaper history and finding guide see John Miller's Indiana Newspaper Bibliography (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982). This is alphabetically arranged within counties by name of town or city where published. It is indexed and includes listings of approximately 8,000 newspapers published between 1804 and 1980, with locations of all known original and/or microform copies.

Indiana has the unusual requirement of having their county recorders maintain, for public use, bound volumes of all newspapers published in their jurisdiction. These may begin as early as 1852. See also Margaret R. Waters, Dorothy Riker, and Doris Leistner, Abstracts of Obituaries in the Western Christian Advocate, 1834-1850 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1988) which includes all genealogical data found in more than 8,000 obituaries in this Methodist church newspaper. The entries are not, however, limited to Methodists; they basically cover the states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. There are surname and geographical indexes.

While records of birth, marriage, and death are the most commonly sought and the most consistently helpful records, only the genealogist’s imagination and resourcefulness limit newspapers’ usefulness in supplying clues about historical events, local history, probate court and legal notices, real estate transactions, political biographies, announcements, notices of new and terminated partnerships, business advertisements, and notices for settling debts.

Newspapers can provide at least a partial substitute for nonexistent civil records. For example, a person’s obituary may have appeared in a newspaper even when civil death records for that person do not exist. And newspapers are an important source of marriage records, particularly in those states where civil recording of marriages was essentially nonexistent until the twentieth century.

Unlike official records, newspapers are not limited to a particular geographical area. They often include reports of the weddings of local citizens (even those that occurred in a neighboring county or another state), and they sometimes report visits of geographically distant relatives or the visits of former local residents. They often published death notices of individuals who had left the area long before but who still had local family or friends as well. In each case the newspaper account can identify the date and place of an event, thus opening the possibility of turning up additional documentation in other sources.

Search Indiana Historical Records - Databases include Court, Land, Wills & Financial Records; Birth, Marriage & Death Records; Voter Lists & Census Records; Immigration & Emigration Records; Obituary Records; Military Records; Family Tree Records; Pictures; Stories, Memories & Histories; Directories & Member Lists and much more....

The first step in searching a newspaper is to identify those which served the area of interest and which have survived. The three most necessary tools are bibliographies (What was published?), inventories of library and depository holdings (Where is it?), and indexes (How do I find what I want in it?).

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