Alabama NewsPapers

"The earliest newspapers in the state were located in the Tombigbee-Mobile area and included the Mobile Sentinel, Fort Stoddert, 1811; Mobile Gazette, Mobile, 1812; Halcyon, St. Stephens, 1815; and Blakeley Sun and Alabama Advertiser, Blakeley, 1819. Early newspapers from the Tennessee Valley included the Madison Gazette, Huntsville, 1812; Florence Gazette, Florence, 1820; and Tuscumbia Advertiser, Tuscumbia, 1821. Other pre-statehood papers included the Cahawba Press and Alabama Intelligencer, Cahawba, 1819; Alabama Courier, Claiborne, 1819; and Tuscaloosa Republican, Tuscaloosa, 1819.

Alabama law requires that all county newspapers that carry legal notices be maintained by that county's probate judge. Few of the county collections are complete.

The Alabama Department of Archives and History has participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities project to preserve old newspapers. A statewide inventory of all repositories was followed by a project to microfilm newspapers of historic significance. A national union list is available for the project, which indexes newspapers by name, place of publication, language, and date of publication. Each entry indicates which issues of the newspaper are extant and the repository which houses those issues. Larger libraries and archives should have the publication United States Newspaper Project National Union List, Microfilm: June 1987, 2d ed. (Dublin, Ohio, 1987)."

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 Alabama 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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