Decades worth of Fall River newspapers are now free online. Here's how to uncover history.

FALL RIVER – Digging into the city's history — and your own — has become incredibly easy thanks to the Fall River Public Library’s initiative to digitize its collection of newspaper microfilm.

The library’s reference department has been quietly uploading decades worth of Herald News pages online — complete copies of every page, every story, every ad, with all the text searchable. In the past week, the library’s latest batch of editions came online at fallriver.advantage-preservation.com, digitized by Advantage Archives. It comes to more than 310,000 pages of Fall River and national history from 1926 to 1968.

It’s the first time that Fall River newspapers from this era have been freely online and searchable.

“It's a free site,” said Conor Murray of the library’s reference department. “There’s no paywall or anything.”

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Those with a nose for news archives — historians, researchers, genealogists, or those just curious about their past — may know that it’s been difficult to access most of Fall River’s newspapers from the 20th century.

Newspapers.com, owned by genealogy company Ancestry.com, has long kept digitized copies of many Fall River papers, starting with the city’s first, the Fall River Monitor, in 1826. Newspapers.com has more than 580,000 pages of Fall River news, including the Evening Herald, Daily Evening News and the Fall River Globe — but nothing after 1923. It also requires a monthly subscription to access from home.

Reference site Newsbank.com maintains a database of Herald News articles, which can be accessed through the library, but only covers 2000 to the present.

This gap of information between 1923 and 2000 was major. Looking up anything from this significant period of history meant combing through reels of scratched microfilm, kept in the library’s reference room. The reels are organized by date, but nothing in the pages themselves is indexed — to find something, users had to know exactly where to look. This new library project goes a long way toward filling that gap, and there’s much more to come.

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Murray said reference room employees spend about half their time answering information requests from people who may only have a vague idea what they’re looking for.

“People will call and say, ‘There was some article about me in the paper, sometime in 1955,’” Murray said. “We can’t look through thousands of images trying to find the article for you. ... We only have so many hours and we have a lot of other tasks to do throughout the day.”

With the archives being digitized and searchable, anyone can simply go online, type in a name or a few keywords, and immediately call up articles as they originally appeared in print, and clip or download them.

Having the archives online is a goldmine for genealogists — decades worth of birth announcements, wedding and engagement notices, social calendar items, obituaries are now easily searchable. These pages are a tapestry of Fall River history, from major events to Little League scores.

“The last few days, I’ve looked up stuff on my own for my family," Murray said. “My dad was born and raised here. All my aunts and uncles. I’m finding birth announcements. ... They were in pageants and plays at St. Patrick’s School.”

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How the Fall River Public Library digitized their archives, and what more is coming

The project has been paid for partially through ARPA funding the library received, and a trust fund the library benefits from, established by the widow of former U.S. Rep. Robert T. Davis, who served one term as Fall River’s mayor from 1873 to 1874.

Many of the library’s microfilm reels were shot in the 1950s, and have been run through readers so many times that they’ve developed deep scratches and tears that would make pages unreadable and unsuitable for scanning.

“We found out that the guys who filmed them for us, New England Micrographics, they have the original negatives,” Murray said.

He's been steadily assessing the library’s microfilm collection, then ordering replacement microfilm reels for those in poor condition. Those fresh reels are sent to Advantage Archive for scanning and uploading. That part of the process alone, he said, takes about six to eight weeks.

“I’m hoping that we get the 20th century done by the end of this year,” Murray said. “But that’s iffy — if we have the funding.”

For now, he said, they’re concentrating on The Herald News archives, but the library also maintains microfilm copies of many other publications that existed in Fall River — long-forgotten weeklies and alternative pubs including the Fall River Argus, the Contact, the Mechanic, the Transcript, the Daily Sun, the All-Sorts and more, and foreign language papers like O Jornal and L’Independant, a French newspaper published from the 1880s until the 1960s. Those, he said, will eventually end up online too.

And in case the Internet ever goes down, Murray said, “We’ll hang on to the microfilms, too, as a backup.”

Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Fall River library uploads decades of newspaper archives for free