UPDATED! Delaware Newspapers

Paper! Paper!

By Members: Mike Miscoski and Reese Robinson

To add color to your family history, look at newspapers published at the time and in the location where your family lived. You will be pleased with the stories of friends and neighbors, accounts of births, marriages, deaths, and the occasional news item.

This article updates a January 2016 First State Genealogist article about the Delaware newspapers available to members from multiple resources. The number of newspapers has dramatically increased since 2016. Below is information on currently available newspaper resources.

Genealogy Bank

Genealogy Bank offers a 7-day free trial, has an annual subscription, and may offer a 1-month subscription. Their collection includes 59,000+ paper issues in 114 papers from 15 cities in Delaware. The oldest is the Delaware Gazette (1785), while their largest collection is the Delaware State News (20,866 issues; 1945-2018).

Newspaper Archive

Newspaper Archive offers a 7-day free trial, has an annual subscription, and may offer a 1-month subscription. Their collection includes 32,000+ issues in 83 newspapers from 11 cities in Delaware. The oldest is the Wilmington Mercury (1798), while their largest collection is the Evening Journal (10,574 issues; 1888-1923).

Newspapers.com

Newspapers.com is perhaps the premier site for research access to newspapers. Most importantly, it is an integral part of the Ancestory.com system, making it easy to save your clippings to your Ancestry tree. It offers a 7-day free trial and two subscription types: Basic or Publisher Extra, which includes more newspapers and unlimited access.

Their collection includes 3,380,000+ pages in 84 papers from 17 cities in Delaware. The oldest is the Wilmington Mercury (1798), while their most extensive collection is The News Journal [actually a cluster of 8 different newspapers] (2,048,000+ pages; 1871-2024).

FindMyPast and MyHeritage

The FindMyPast collection of 2,404 newspapers is focused on England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the rest of the world. This latter group includes two US newspapers, but none from Delaware.

MyHeritage offers the Delaware News and the Sunday Morning Star, but more importantly, in March 2024, it introduced a new newspaper resource: OldNews.com.

OldNews.com

OldNews.com is the newest newspaper research resource. At launch, the website included newspapers from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Austria, Germany, Czechia, the Netherlands, and Australia. OldNews.com offers a 7-day free trial and an annual subscription. However, they do not openly declare the number of newspapers, the years covered, or the number of issues/pages. Our research indicates that OldNews includes about 101 papers from 12 cities in Delaware.

OldNews is integrated with MyHeritage, meaning that, at this writing, MyHeritage and OldNews.com users can use their log-in credentials across both platforms.

Chronicling America

Chronicling America is the free newspaper collection of the Library of Congress. They currently include 111 papers from 15 cities in Delaware. This collection provides images of newspaper pages and is OCR imaged. With Search and “Advanced Search” functionality, you can search for words, names, and phrases. Additionally, a new beta collection with enhancements is still under development. See the link for the Beta interface below.

Google News Archive

Google News Archive, an extension of Google News, had a short life (2006-2011). The service is free, but it includes only four Delaware newspapers: The Cape Gazette, the Sunday Morning Star, The Star, and the Wilmington Morning Star.

Many Other Newspaper Resources

There are many other resources for researching Delaware genealogy and history via newspapers:

• Delaware Newspapers Research Guide at the University of Delaware
• Delaware Online Historical Newspapers Summary via The Ancestor Hunt
• List of Newspapers in Delaware from Wikipedia
• Delaware Newspapers from Family Search
• United States Newspapers from Family Search
• Chronicling America (Beta version) from the Library of Congress
• Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries from the Library of Congress
• Newspapers on Film from the Delaware Public Archives
• Library Catalog – Newspapers from the Delaware Historical Society
• Your Guide to Using Newspapers for Genealogical Research

Before you apply a filter.

• General Information:
  • Filters limit the table displays.
  • The Source, Old News, and other columns may not display dates, pages, or connections. Blank fields will display “Unknown”.
• Years Covered Column:
  • The Years Covered date column has been cataloged from various sources using different formats.
  • Within the Years Covered filter, only search by year (e.g., 1889). The whole date is not required.
• Filter Behavior:
  • The filter may not work as expected. It is advisable to find the Source, City, or Title before applying the Years Covered filter.
  • Example: Searching for the city of Wilmington will find 106 entries. Applying a From date of 1886 will reduce the search results to 30. Applying a To date of 1889 will reduce the list to 11. Note: You may see years outside of the filter dates.
• General Search and Filters:
  • The general search can be used in conjunction with filters. For example, a search for Farm in the General Search will result in two entries in Wilmington newspapers.
• Handling Unknown Fields:
  • Filtering on Years Covered will not display blank (“Unknown”) fields.
• Use this functionality as is.

Click a row within the table to see all data, including alternate titles.

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