MyHeritage launches OldNews.com, providing access to millions of historical newspaper pages

MyHeritage has unveiled OldNews.com, a new website providing access to thousands of historical newspapers primarily from the 1800s and 1900s. The platform features articles from a wide range of newspapers, spanning major international publications to small-town journals and gazettes. Its search engine facilitates quick retrieval of information related to individuals, topics, or events. OldNews operates on a subscription basis, priced at $99 per year with a 7-day free trial.

The website caters to genealogists, educators, researchers, and history enthusiasts, enabling them to explore articles about people and events throughout history. Users can uncover stories about their ancestors or gain deeper insights into various historical moments, including headline news, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, sports and culture, lifestyle news, advertisements, and more. MyHeritage plans to continuously expand its newspaper database, adding millions more newspaper pages each month.

At launch, OldNews features newspapers from publications across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Austria, the Netherlands, and Australia. The company aims to include content from additional countries in the future. The platform is accessible in 11 languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The news content underwent processing using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and was further enhanced with algorithms developed in-house by MyHeritage.

“MyHeritage’s team has collaborated with libraries and archives worldwide to curate the finest selection of historical newspapers,” remarked Myko Clelland, MyHeritage’s Director of Content in Europe. “Following the digitization process, we applied our cutting-edge proprietary optical character recognition and AI language modeling process to the printed material. This resulted in an accurate, best-in-class text database exclusive to OldNews, enabling users to search and match using names, dates, locations, and keywords.”