Introducing the Digital Archives of MCDL

MCDL is excited to announce that we now have a Digital Archives. These archives will include 60,000+ pages of Medina County newspapers, covering 1830 to 1996. This resource opens up many possibilities for family and local history research.

Below you will find a few Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers) about the archives’ contents and how to use it.  

If you’d like to learn more about searching the Digital Archives, join our virtual program Finding Your Family in the News on Tuesday, February 23rd at 6:30 PM.  Register to attend at this link:  https://medinacounty.evanced.info/signup/EventDetails?EventId=42729&backTo=Calendar&startDate=2021/02/17 

How do I access the Digital Archives?

It’s easy!  There are no fees and you do not need to log in.  Just click https://www.mcdl.info/newspapers.  

This link is accessible from everywhere and anywhere.  It will include all of the newspapers in the archives from 1830-1977.  (To access more recent newspapers in the archives, you’ll need to visit one of the MCDL library branches.)

What’s included in the Digital Archives?

Here are the titles that will be included in the database.  Some of the titles are still being added to the archive, but we hope to have them all available by mid-March. 

• The Constitutionalist – 1830-1840 – 24 pages ​

• Ohio Free Press – 1832 – 1836 – 27 pages​

• The Watchtower – 1838 – 1842 – 616 pages​

• The Democratic Whig – 1845-1853 – 26 pages​

• Medina County Democrat – 1852 – 1854 – 24 pages​

• The Medina County Republican – 1867 – 1868 – 53 pages​

• Medina Mirror – 1854 – 1868 – 399 pages​

• Medina County Gazette – 1854 – 1926 - 28,893 pages​

• The Young Folks Gem / Apple Blossom – 1875 – 1876 – 120 pages​**

• The Lodi Review – 1888 – 1955 – 3,897 pages**

• Bowman's Facts and Fun for Farmers – 1933 – 1951 – 44 pages​**

• Medina Trading Post – 1934 – 1964 – 28 pages ​**

• Bank Notes – 1944 – 1971 – 1,328 pages​**

• The Madison Pickle Vine – 1944 – 1946 – 192 pages​**

• The Medinamite (MHS Newspaper) – 1944 – 1946, 1981 – 1983 – 289 pages**

• Match Tips – 1950 – 1956 – 266 pages**

• The Lodi Advertiser – 1955 – 1987 – 19,904 pages​**

• The Review Chronicle – 1989 – 1993 – 3,635 pages​++

• Crossroads – 1994 – 1996 – 336 pages​++

** = title to be added soon

++ = title available at library branches only

Where are the originals of these newspapers?

Some of the newspapers were in MCDL's collection, but many were loaned to us by the Medina County Historical Society and the Lodi Harrisville Historical Society. All of the papers will also be available on microfilm at MCDL. Digitizing these historic documents makes them more accessible to researchers and helps preserve them, by reducing wear-and-tear on the originals.

How do I search the Digital Archives?

At its simplest, you can search the archives with keywords.  Any word(s) or phrases can work - names of ancestors, geographic locations, historic events, weather… literally, any word you can think of!  (You could even search for all occurrences of the word “the” in the archives!)  

You also have an option to search with “All Of The Words” in your search query, an “Exact Phrase,” “Any Of The Words” in your query, or “None Of The Words” (or mix and match these options).  You can narrow down your findings by limiting the dates included in the search, or which newspaper title you are searching.  

What do I do when I find an article I want to keep?

The archive has a few options for saving your discoveries.  You can download an entire page as a PDF, or use the cropping tools to save an article of interest as a JPEG.  You can print articles, plus add titles, tags, and even colorized filters to cropped articles.  

Here’s an example of searching and saving records: 

I was interested in learning more about the robbery of the Ohio Farmers’ Insurance Company.  From other sources, I knew that the robbery had occurred in some time in 1865.  Here’s how I searched to find contemporaneous articles about the event.  

Initially, I searched on the “Exact Phrase” of “Ohio Farmers.” 

That returned over 1,000 results -- more than I wanted to browse through and read!  

So, I refined my search.  I added a “Any Of The Words” field and entered the terms “robbery” and “theft.”  These terms now searched the database for any page of the newspapers that included the phrase “Ohio Farmers” along with either the word “robbery” or the word “theft.” 

This search returned 80 pages of newspapers that matched these terms.  Still more than I wanted to read through.  

Lastly, I added a date to my search.  Since I really wanted articles from the year of the robbery (1865) but didn’t know the exact date, I set the date field to “Between: “01/01/1865” and “12/31/1865.”  These search terms with a narrowed date range returned just four results!  

All of the search results looked promising, so I clicked on Page  2 of the Medina Gazette, from July 8th, 1865.  It was just what I was looking for: the article revealed that the robbery had occurred on April 3, 1865 and that the thieves had taken nearly $50,000 worth of bonds!  

You can download the entire page, with just the click of a button (circled in orange). It will save as a PDF to your computer or device.

To save just your article, click the "Crop" button (circled in orange) and adjust the height and width of the box around your article...

...then follow the steps and click print or save (circled in orange). If you save the article, it will download as a JPEG to your device.

Here is the article, in case you want to read it!

If you need assistance with using the Digital Archives, register for our class on 2/23 or email the MCDL Genealogy Team with questions at me-team.genealogy@mcdl.info. We hope you enjoy searching in this new resource!