Thursday, December 4, 2014

La Stampa - Archivio Storico dal 1867

If you've been working on your Italian research for quite some time, you'll know that it has not been easy to access newspaper resources for Italy. It's not like in the U.S., where there is a plethora of companies that have digitized a large quantity of the surviving newspapers.

Therefore, it's exciting to see the newspaper La Stampa put all of their issues online. These issues can be found at the link below.

http://www.archiviolastampa.it

However, newspapers pre-1900 are of little value to those researching ancestors in the peasant class. Not only were these ancestors not literate and unable to read such publications, they often wouldn't have done anything that would have been noted in the newspaper unless it was a criminal act. There were no small town ramblings about who visited who and who traveled to where, as we see in small town U.S. newspapers.

However, they bring great value in increasing a researcher's understanding of cultural context as well as historical and political events.

Happy hunting!