History buffs, academics, schoolchildren and genealogists have a new treasure trove at their fingertips - an online archive of the state's earliest newspapers.
The collection, 23,483 digital images of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries, is available through the N.C. State Archives' Web site. The papers date from 1751 to the 1890s and are mostly from the oldest towns in the eastern part of the state, including Wilmington, Edenton and New Bern. A selection from Salisbury offers a perspective from the western part of the state.
The newspapers document North Carolina's civic, political, cultural and social events from Colonial times through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Previously, they had been available only on microfilm at the State Archives in Raleigh.
But now the collection is available free to anyone, anywhere. It can be searched by publication, year and keyword.
The N.C. Digitization Project was unveiled in mid-December. As of Monday, the site had logged 4,000 hits from 1,000 visitors, said Druscie Simpson, head of the archives' information management branch.
Traffic is expected to pick up once word spreads among amateur genealogists, who will be searching for surnames in an attempt to reconstruct their family trees. Many of the newspapers contain some of the earliest birth, death and marriage records in North Carolina.
"It's really endless, what you can do with this," Simpson said.
The site includes several lesson plans for teachers, who can use the historic documents to examine slavery, for example, by looking at advertisements or explore the daily life of the North Carolina home front during the Civil War.
The papers also give clues to the political sentiments of the time, including letters to the editor and in occasionally strident articles. Some of the earliest editions show the growing anger by the colonists toward the crown.
The first known newspaper was the North-Carolina Gazette, published in New Bern in August of 1751. The earliest edition in the digital archive is from Nov. 15, 1751, and carried the Latin motto "Semper Pro Libertate, et Bono Publico," or "Always for Freedom and the Public Good."
Though the archive is keyword searchable, the newspapers aren't always easy to read. Sometimes the quality of the print is poor or pages have been damaged.
The project proved a huge undertaking for archivists. The April 14, 1775, edition of the North Carolina Gazette, for example, was 52 pages long and completely handwritten.
The newspaper project is just one example of an effort to digitize historic records at libraries around the country. Many are seeking federal grants to preserve the documents and make them accessible online.
The state also has more than 400 family Bible records online from North Carolina. The records, photocopied and donated by families, are searchable and more are added every few months.
Lists of births, deaths and marriages in the newly digitized newspapers should provide more help to genealogists looking to uncover their roots.
The old newspapers can also bring history alive for students who are comfortable navigating the Internet, said Sandra Cook, coordinator of the state Newspapers in Education program for the N.C. Press Foundation.
Cook expects to devise new lesson plans to help teachers dig through the evidence of the state's past.
"We need to digitize newspapers because of the history," she said. "It's primary source material."
