Genealogy: Dallas Metro News Collection

With your library card, you have access to digital issues of the Dallas Morning News from 1885 – 2017 and other DFW news sources. Whether you’re researching your ancestry through obituaries and news articles, or curious what happened on your birthday, the NewsBank media archive is a great resource to view historical news online. In this post we’ll show you how this database works, but for a hands-on help using newspapers to find your family, come to our Obituaries, Society Columns and News workshop at the Genealogy Center on Thursday, December 5 at 9:30 am.

You will need your library card number (found on the back of your library card) to access this database.

After clicking the Dallas Morning News link on the main page, you can pick specific years, months and days, or search a particular topic. For this example, we picked July 21, 1969, the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which celebrated it’s 50th anniversary this year:

When you hover over the scanned paper, it allows you to select specific articles, making it easier to print, download or email. There are many features, like zooming in and out, and the page selection to make viewing this scanned copy easier.

On the main page you can also search by keyword, name or topic and it will search dozens of local papers like Allen American, Denton Record-Chronicle and Plano Star Courier. We searched “plano public library”, and saw a variety of results about events, grant awards and other city news:

On NewsBank you can also create an account to save documents and news articles. When you are in an article or scanned copy of a paper, click on the “Save to my Folder” icon to keep the article for later.

If you’re curious how to locate and use newspapers to find your family, come to our Obituaries, Society Columns and News workshop at the Genealogy Center on Thursday, December 5 at 9:30 am. The Genealogy Center is located in the basement at Haggard Library at 2501 Coit Rd. in Plano.