Digitized Newspapers

The following digitized Huron County newspapers are now available to search online:

Access The Online Collection

Each weekly newspaper carries local, regional, national and international news.

The digitization of historical Huron County newspapers from microfilm and hard copy holdings is an ongoing long-term project that will continue for years into the future. Public access to newspapers is limited by copyright (current to 50 years after death of publisher); newspapers with current copyright restrictions will not be posted online without the permission of the publisher. Newspapers on microfilm are still available at Huron County Library branches, including more recent issues of local weeklies.

Note: Missing issues reflect gaps in the original microfilm or newsprint collections scanned.

**Huron County Library generally does not own the rights to material in the digitized newspaper collection and, therefore, cannot grant or deny permission to publish or otherwise distribute the material. It is the responsibility of the user to seek permission from the copyright holder for any purpose other than research and private study.

Newspaper Search Hints

Having problems/errors while searching? Try hitting “reset” & then customize your search parameters!

Use “Text Search” to search for people, places, events and organizations!

(find “text” by clicking “customize search”)

This function will allow you to instantly search within the text of thousands of newspaper images.

Use quotation marks to search for a phrase!

If you enter two or more search terms without quotations marks, you will find every instance where these words appear on the same page.

If you put quotation marks around your search term, results will only show those instances where a combination of words occur together in that order. Use quotes to significantly specify & reduce the number of results you see.

Use ‘within’ to limit results!

By using the ‘and’ function or separating search terms with commas, you will find every instance where these words appear on the same page.

Select ‘within’ to narrow these results to instances when the terms appear within a certain proximity to each other. This will help you narrow the results, even when you’re not sure what order the specific words will appear in.

Use ‘or’ to find twice the relevant hits!

If the name or subject you are searching for has a common alternate spelling or misspelling, use “Or” to search for both versions and maximize your results.

Use ‘And’ to quickly look for two phrases together!

Select ‘And’ to find instances where two subjects appear together on the same page.

Use an asterisk for wildcard searches!

Typing an asterisk (*) within your search term will return results with multiple possible characters in its place. Ie (searching for jail* will also return results for jailer, jailed, etc)

Use “Field” to narrow your results based on the publication date or place of newspapers!

(find “field” by clicking “customize search”)

Use “field” searches in tandem with the subjects you enter under “text” to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Search within a specific date range!

Under Field, select “publication date” in the drop-down menu, and enter the date range you would like to search within (Note: you must select a year, month & date)

Search within one town/village!

Under Field, select “city” in the drop-down menu, and enter the name of the town or village. (Note: This will narrow any results to those within any available newspapers published in that community)

MORE HINTS

Don’t see the community you want to research? Search anyway! You may still find lots of results: Huron County papers covered notable national & international stories, as well as carrying items from other local papers. If the organization you’re searching for was in Brussels, you might still find a mention of it in an Exeter newspaper.

• Looking for your ancestor? Try searching with shortforms for common Christian names (ie Geo., Thos., Wm., Jno., Chris., Alex.), and also try searching Miss, Mr. & Mrs. with the surname to either increase your results or narrow them
• The OCR program (optical character recognition) program that reads the files is not perfect—if the subject you search does not turn up on an initial keyword search, you might be able to read relevant information with the human eye that the OCR has missed if you search by date-especially for badly damaged or faded issues
• If you know the date of a marriage, death or other notable event, try filtering by date & browsing through the relevant newspapers.
• Try searching alternate spellings & misspellings (ie the OCR program would have trouble distinguishing between the ‘i’ and ‘l’ in M-C-I-L-W-A-I-N, so also search M-C-I-I-W-A-I-N or M-C-L-L-W-A-I-N)
• If you see no results for a name or organization, try searching any other context information you know (ie the lot and concession they lived on, groups, churches, or schools attended, and using ‘and’ or ‘within’ searches with the location)