Northern New York Historical Papers

I thought that for this weeks post I'd highlight some local history. The Northern New York Historical Papers website is a collection from forty-five papers that can be used to access information about the regions history. Newspaper collections are from Oswego, Jefferson, Lewis, Essex, Franklin, Clinton and St. Lawrence County. The user can search all papers in a given county or a search from one particular paper.  You can search for anything by just putting in keyword or phrase. For example, I did a search for the last name of Brander and got 752 documents that contained that word. I then decided to narrow my search a bit and put in John Brander with a search type of "the exact words" and I got 33 documents.  You are then able to scroll down through and view a short description of the article that mentions your search terms. If you click on the link to that particular paper, you'll be able to see the entire page from that newspaper. Check out below an interesting article I found or view the whole page here. Apparently, my Great Grandfather had a new radio installed in January of 1926 and that was big news.
There are many possibilities for how this can be used in the classroom. If you are teaching a unit on local history, students could search for a chosen topic or even research their family. Although they may not have a hit for 1800 pop up, I'm sure anything from 1970 or 1980 would seem "cool" to them! If nothing else you can use this for your own personal use. So go ahead and check it out!