Elephind is a great service that searches online digital newspaper collections. Best of all, it is available free of charge.
On a personal note, I was a bit skeptical at first, as most of my relatives are definitely not famous or newsworthy, but on researching one ancestor who was a merchant marine captain there were ten or more pages of articles, mostly shipping news, but well worth going through.
Elephind.com is a search engine that operates much like Google, Bing, or other search engines. The one thing that is different with Elephind is that it searches only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search, for free, across many newspaper sites simultaneously, rather than having to visit each collection’s web site separately.
At this time, Elephind has indexed 2,779 newspaper titles containing more than two and a half million editions, ranging from March 1803 up to January 1, 2015 in some titles. The Elephind search engine has indexed 149,363,907 items from 2,779 newspaper titles. These include such well known sites as the Chronicling America (the U.S.’s Library of Congress) and Trove (National Library of Australia), as well as smaller collections like Door County Library in Wisconsin. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com.
For more information on using Elephind, please click here.
Give it a try, you may be surprised and pleased at what you find.
Source: Dick Eastman, the Daily On Line Genealogy Newsletter