Worldwide Newspaper Websites
Many countries have old newspapers available on-line. They can be an excellent way of discovering the lives of emigrant ancestors. They are also a useful way of discovering how news about Britain was perceived in other parts of the world, as well as for researching the history of those countries. There may be a charge for accessing any newspaper.
There are a number of websites, some maintained by Universities, that post information about which papers are available on-line and possibly links to them. As new material is appearing on-line weekly, it is unlikely that any site can guarantee to be up-to-date, so it is worth checking more than one.
Sites which hold a considerable amount of material in English include:
http://www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov – A project providing access to digitised newspapers from the United States.
http://trove.nla.gov.au – A National Library of Australia project giving access to newspapers and periodicals.
http://natlib.govt.nz – Papers Past is managed by the National Library of New Zealand.
http://libguides.bgsu.edu/CanadianNewspapers – provides links to Canadian newspapers that are freely available on-line.
https://www.irishnewsarchive.com/ – A subscription website for newspapers from Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
http://www.gutenberg.org – provides free downloads of out of copyright e-books. The site has some periodicals, including Punch and Chambers Journal available and is always worth checking.
https://news.google.com – contains a number of historical newspapers from many countries.
Sites holding material in languages other than English include:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/html/presse-et-revues/les-principaux-quotidiens – Information about historical newspapers from France.
http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufklaerung/zeitschriften.htm – Information about historical newspapers from Germany.
http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk – A site operated by the National Library of Wales, it holds some newspapers written in Welsh.