California Digital Newspaper Collection

Los Angeles Herald, Volume 37, Number 270, 28 June 1910 - California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside, .

If your ancestors lived in California, you may find information about them in the California Digital Newspaper Collection at cdnc.ucr.edu.  Hosted by the University of California, Riverside, the website contains more than 500,000 digitized and text-searchable pages from California newspapers dating from 1846 to 1922.

Official birth and death records for California don't begin until 1905, so newspapers are an important resource for documenting lives before the 20th century. To learn more about the California Digital Newspaper Collection, stop by the Family History Center.

Voter Registrations

Now that we're past the dramatic focus on the elections and voters, you may want to consider the value of voter registration in a totally different way.  Voter Registration records can be a great source of birth and residence information in family history research.  

Online collections of voter registration records are available through both free and "for pay" sites, including the California, Great Registers, 1866-1910 (FamilySearch.org), Alabama 1867 Voter Registration at archives.alabama.gov and voter registration records for Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom at Ancestry.com.  The Family History Library Catalog includes more than 2,000 listings for voter records. Go to FamilySearch.org, click on Catalog, select "Subject" search and type the state where your ancestor lived plus the word "vote." (Not every location will have voter records.)