Accessing the Old Newspapers of Fredericksburg

There have been newspapers published in Fredericksburg since 1788. (The only gap came in 1862-65, when the city was devastated by war.)  Fredericksburg has been a one-newspaper town – the Free Lance-Star –- since the 1920s, but before that many newspapers were published locally…. 

Years ago Bob Hodge indexed all the old newspapers of Fredericksburg from 1788 to 1928. His indexes are available in hard-copy in CRRL’s Virginiana Collection, and online at http://departments.umw.edu/hipr/www/fredburg.htm . Note that these are indexes only – not texts.

The Free Lance-Star has created recently a word-searchable, online, printable, full-text archive of articles. It's splendid! http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/archives. But this archive goes back only to 2001 and is selective – ads are omitted, for example.

Google News (ain’t Google great!?) has even more recently SCANNED all issues of the Free Lance-Star back to 1920, and made them word-searchable!!!!  http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search . The value of this to anyone doing local history, or the family tree, cannot be overestimated!

If you are interested in working with the old newspapers of Fredericksburg, call CRRL Reference Librarian Jeffrey Garth Edmunds at 540-372-1144, ext. 233. He’d love to be helpful!