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How can you access our newspaper archives?
By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog
January 8, 2010

A reader asked recently about how far back our online archives go. The good news is you now can search back much farther than ever before.

Google, which apparently is digitizing the world, has scanned the Victoria Advocate's microfilm archives and placed almost all of them on the Web. You can do a keyword search of them at VictoriaAdvocate.com by clicking on "archives." Longtime residents might test this by searching for the name of a grandparent or some historical figure from our community's past.

If you click on "site" in the search button, you will be looking through stories posted only since February 2008. We're working to complete the transfer of data from an old computer system into our new one. Once that project is complete, our site archives will go back to 1998, about the time the Advocate went online. We also are working to enhance the display of search results.

Of course, Victoria College and the Victoria Public Library remain excellent resources for researching local history, too. We encourage you to start there for any big project. Our longtime Advocate librarian, Robbi Patterson, is a wonderful resource for our staff, but she doesn't have the time to work with all of our readers on research projects. If you have a simple question or two, she's more than happy to help.

We're still testing the Google archives and seeing how well they work. I just found an Advocate article from Jan. 15, 1906, about Mrs. J.C. Warden's remarkable history and her birth in 1836 in the pioneer home of Edward McDonough. Let us know what you're able to find.

Comments


  • legion357 legion357 Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    That's a great search option. I had no problem at all.

    Thanks VicAd

    January 8, 2010 at 5:08 p.m.

  • ChrisCobler ChrisCobler Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    Sunshine,
    Have you tried entering a word in the search field? The functionality isn't as intuitive as we'd like, but I've entered keywords with success.

    January 8, 2010 at 4:54 p.m.

  • sunshine32 sunshine32 Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    The instructions above do not work. When I click on either one, the web just sits there and tells you "done" at the bottom of the screen.

    January 8, 2010 at 3:33 p.m.

  • AltonEaston AltonEaston Report a ViolationReport a Violation
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    Local newspaper is often the single source for recorded historical events. They also often provide genealogical research aids. It is a great service that the Advocate is providing.

    January 8, 2010 at 1:27 p.m.