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Georgia NewsPapers

The Georgia Department of Archives and History and the University of Georgia in Athens have the largest newspaper collections. Other university, public, and genealogical libraries have smaller collections, including the FHL. Consult holdings for titles.

The Georgia Newspaper Project of the University of Georgia Libraries has to date microfilmed over 8,000 reels of Georgia newspapers. This collection is not available on interlibrary loan, but copies can be purchased. The Georgia Historical Society in Savannah and the University of Georgia Libraries in Athens have every-name indexes to the Savannah newspapers from 1763 to 1845. The Georgia Department of Archives and History has this index to 1830 and parts of it for 1835–45. Indexes have also been published for early Augusta and Milledgeville newspapers. Many other Georgia newspapers have published and indexed abstracts to marriage and death notices.

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.

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?).

• Search Historical Newspapers at Ancestry.com
• The Atlanta Constitution (Allen County Public Library): Editions of the "The Constitution" and "The Atlanta Constitution," published in Atlanta, Georgia, 17 Jun 1868 through 31 Dec 1914 (missing Oct. 1905). Explore headline news, editorials, sports, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism over a broad span of years and covering a number of important events including reconstruction, perspectives on the New South, the Great War, and many historic developments that affected Georgia, the South, and the nation.
• Find your family history In The World's Largest Newspaper Archive! Find News, Births and Deaths - Find tens of millions of historical newspaper articles, dating back to 1759. Search for newspaper articles about a deadly earthquake or one that mentions a past relative. Newspaper articles are easily accessible with online research tools.
• Find Obituaries in The World's Largest Newspaper Archive at NewpaperArchive.com! - Find thousands of obituaries to help you research your family history. Search for a newspaper obituary about your ancestor or a celebrity. Begin your search today and find death notices and funeral announcements printed in newspapers throughout the world.
• Search Obituaries from Georgia Newspapers at ObitsArchive.com - it is the largest and most comprehensive collection of newspaper obituaries and death notices in the United States. Each obituary or death notice is indexed by the name of the deceased person, to make searching easier and more precise. In addition, the text of each obituary or death notice is searchable, making it easy to find just what you're looking for using a place of residence, occupation, names of family members, or other personal information.
• Search Historical Newspapers (1690 - 1980) - Quickly find names and keywords in over 125 million articles, obituaries, marriage notices, birth announcements and other items published in more than 500,000 issues of over 2,500 historical U.S. newspapers. New content added monthly