It’s been a wild 2024 so far and the Universe just keeps reminding me I am on the right track or the “write track” if we want to get punny. I don’t know about you, but I do love a good pun!
I follow many historic sites and history themed pages on my socials and I always love seeing old newspaper articles on what journalists and society thought about the people and events of the time. This morning as I was driving to work, I was thinking that maybe it’s time to get a subscription to the local newspaper’s archives as they go back well into the late 1700s (the joys of living in an incredibly historic area of New York State) and hoping the access would give me some additional inspiration as I work on Ophelia & Asher’s story. When I got to work, we were discussing an elderly customer we hadn’t heard from in a while, and I googled her name to see if she had passed away. As I was reviewing the results of my search, I came across an absolute treasure trove of archives that are available for FREE! I was in absolute history heaven and just completely nerding out as I started perusing the site to see what goodies I could find. It was a completely serendipitous moment for me.
The amazing site I stumbled across is https://news.hrvh.org/ and it is part of the Hudson River Valley Heritage archive and resource collection. They have many old and obscure newspapers archived from eight Hudson Valley counties spanning from the 1800s until the mid-twentieth century. Hudson River Valley Heritage is a service of the Southeastern NY Library System and, along with the newspaper archive, they also have digital collections from the local colleges (including Bard, The Culinary Institute, and Vassar) as well as links to collections at local historic sites, virtual exhibits from local museums and libraries, and a link to the Empire Archival Discovery Group (which is a tool to locate archives and collections across New York State).
The newspaper archive is AMAZING! There is a full search feature with filters available by region, decade and collection. You can even get a full PDF of the newspaper issue or just clip a specific section, advertisement or article!
Check out the engagement announcement of William K Vanderbilt (aka Willie K) to Mrs. Lewis M Rutherford from the April 21, 1903 issue of the Kingston Daily Freeman. The article discusses Willie K’s previous marriage to Alva Vanderbilt, the subsequent divorce, which created a HUGE scandal in 1895, and a lovely detailed description of Willie K’s bride-to-be:
A few years ago, I wrote a post about my great-grandparents and their life during the Gilded Age as part of the emerging middle class. One of the newspapers available with the HRVH archives is the Putnam County Courier, which was the local newspaper where my great-grandparents lived in Granite Springs. I searched up my great-grandpa’s name and found a few short blurbs about my family, including the birth announcement of my grandmother (whom most of us lovingly referred to as Nanny or Nan) from the February 23, 1923 edition:
I love that the small local papers covered who visited whom, where they traveled, the neighbors doing home improvements and even who was on the “sick list” and updates on how they were progressing.
I am so excited to find this archive and I completely elated that the visuals are immaculate and extremely easy to read. I will definitely be diving down a few rabbit holes this weekend and gathering up newspaper clippings to share here and on my socials!
Happy historical resource diving my friends!
Evelina Wood 