German Newspaper Collections

January 1, 2019 - So, it's the first day of 2019 and I have been on furlough since December 24 due to the Federal government not passing a budget. I won't get into all of the politics of the situation but I do hope to make the best of this extra time off and get back into posting a few more articles while I am off.

One of the topics that I have been focusing on lately is my German research. I have discovered many great websites over the last couple months. I will try to discuss some of them in my next couple posts.

One of my favorite resources are newspaper collections. Not only do they contain valuable genealogical information but they also tell the story of what was happening during a person's life. But how do you find German newspaper collections?

Over the last decade, Germany has been working to make its newspaper collections available and many of these collections are now online.

One such collection is found at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin website. This site has over 276,000 issues from 193 historical newspapers. Most of these newspapers are from Germany but they also have some German language newspapers from abroad including Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other areas. Some of the papers have full text search capabilities but I have not found their metasearch to be very helpful unless you are looking for towns. Most of the newspapers in their collection have publication dates from the later part of the 1800s to the mid 1900s but they have a few from the 1600s and 1700s.

The Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek also has an extensive collection of newspapers with over 1050 titless and 6.5 million pages digitized. I had better luck searching surnames from this site than I had in the Berlin collection.

But do you have time to search around for the newspapers you need to further your research? Most of us don't want to spend hours looking for a page that might be useful. So, how do you find a list of sites to start with?

One of my favorite collections of newspaper links is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a list of online newspaper archives from around the world. You can select the country of interest and see what collections are available.

Another great list can be found at the BYU Harold B. Lee Library's website called Euro Docs. From the Euro Docs website you can select the country of interest and search under several subtopics to find the resource you are interested in. For example, you can find the Historic German Newspaper collection by clicking Germany>>Historic German Newspapers and Journals Online>>Local Newspapers (See Historic German Newspapers Online) or just use the hyperlink I provided. To make it easier to use, the Historic German Newspapers are listed by city of publication.

Now for the hard part - can you read German Fraktur? One way to learn it is to research the alphabet to determine which letters they are writing. BYU provides a great tutorial for reading the Fraktur letters. Once you are able to read the letters, you can try Google Translate and begin typing in the words you see to see what they are translated as. If you have a well typed document you might be able to upload it as a pdf and have Google translate it but that is often questionable because so many Fraktur letters look similar.

These are only a couple of collections but they should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Good luck.