My thanks go to one of my blog readers, Janette, for sharing this news with me – that the Tarboro, NC newspaper, The Daily Southerner, is going to cease publication. The blog of the National Genealogical Society has a post about it written by Diane Richard. If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you may have seen that I was recently in Tarboro as my maternal grandmother was born there and I have many relatives from the area.
In fact, while I was going through Tarboro, I passed the office of the paper and turned around so I could take a picture of it – I’m such a fan of newspapers, exactly for the many points that Diane Richard makes in her blog post about the paper’s demise – they capture so many life moments that can be goldmines for genealogical research! This news make my picture even more poignant.
Fortunately, due to ongoing digitizing efforts, the full-text of more than 2,000 older issues are available online at the Library of Congress and DigitalNC.org, so I have the opportunity to search and browse them for tidbits on my family members.
But, Diane also makes a good point with regard to how will the type of news often reported in newspapers get captured and archived in our current digital & social media environment? I wonder if the State Library in North Carolina is pondering this issue? They’ve been so great at capturing our print news, I only hope they are working to capture the state’s electronic news as well. I will need to make it a point to look into this. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to comb through the older issues looking for material that will help me learn more about the community and my ancestors & relatives.