4.2 Million Pages of News!

Virginia Chronicle, the Library of Virginia’s database of digitized newspapers, has reached a page count of nearly 4.2 million! Since October, many new titles, spanning 1836-2019, have been added to the site providing users of Virginia Chronicle access to a growing array of local weeklies and dailies published from throughout Virginia.

A new feature added to the Virginia Chronicle homepage in December is the “New Arrivals” list, which shows titles recently added to the database. If the title is completely new to Virginia Chronicle, it will say “New Title!” next to it. If additional issues of a newspaper already on Virginia Chronicle were added, it will also be listed on the “New Arrivals” list, but without the “New Title!” distinction. This is a great way for users to learn about new additions to the site so make sure to check it out when visiting Virginia Chronicle.

Among the new offerings are newspapers from Bath, Blackstone, Edinburg, Fredericksburg, Grundy, Louisa, Norfolk, Richmond, Staunton and Winchester. Additional issues of the Fauquier Democrat of Warrenton, the Herald Progress of Ashland, the Public Ledger of Norfolk, the Smithfield Times of Smithfield and the Southwest Times of Pulaski are also now available.

In November, several Halifax Court House titles were added to the site, including, People’s Advocate (June 27, 1856), Virginia Echo (1859-1860), Halifax Advertiser (1883-1888), the Record-Advertiser (1912, 1935, 1937), Halifax Times (Nov. 16, 1867), and the Halifax Record (1870-1888). A Feb. 22, 1855 issue of the Milton Chronicle, of Milton, N.C., with the motto, “Pledg’d to no party’s arbitrary sway—we range where right and duty point the way,” is also now available.

In early 2024, look for additional issues of the Peninsula Enterprise, Rappahannock Record, Floyd Press, North of the James, Clinch Valley News and Herald Progress, as those will be arriving to the site then. New titles from Fauquier and York Counties as well as UVA’s College Topics will also be making an appearance on Virginia Chronicle in the near future, so keep a lookout for those as well.

We like to remind researchers that becoming a registered user of Virginia Chronicle offers additional benefits to users. By becoming a registered user, you can create and print PDFs, create private lists of saved articles and do text correction, a crowdsourcing feature of Virginia Chronicle that improves searchability through the correction of OCR errors. Thanks to our dedicated text correctors, well over 6 million lines of text have been corrected! To learn more, visit the “text correction” page on Virginia Chronicle.

Whether for genealogy, historical research or just for fun, visit Virginia Chronicle for all of your newspaper research needs today!