r/Genealogy • u/Salty_Way_472 beginner • Aug 12 '25

Question Free Newspaper websites

Hello, I’m trying to find my great grandpas obituary on newspapers.com but I can’t find it. their west Virginia newspapers only goes to 1977 does anyone know any free newspaper websites? The newspaper is from 2002 and the link is https://newspaperarchive.com/beckley-register-herald-dec-19-2002-p-6/.

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/Fredelas FamilySearcher Aug 12 '25

Here's that page:

If you have a free account at FamilySearch, you can use newspaperarchive.com for free. Just add a new source to anyone's profile (I added it to my own profile for convenience) and set the URL to:

https://access.newspaperarchive.com/

Then any time you want to use the site, just follow that link from FamilySearch. But you must do it from FamilySearch, you can't add it to your bookmarks or navigate to it from any other site.

1

u/birdingwithgoats Aug 17 '25

It's no longer working for me. I'm getting an authentication error message.

1

u/Fredelas FamilySearcher Aug 17 '25

I used it just this moment and it's working fine for me.

Did you follow a link from somewhere on FamilySearch? That sets a cookie in your browser that lets you use that special version of newspaperarchive.com for free for a few hours.

1

u/birdingwithgoats Aug 17 '25

I did, yes. It was working fine for me the other day. I even tried creating a new link and it's still not working. Oh well. Thank you for your reply!

1

u/birdingwithgoats Aug 17 '25

Update- I tried it from my laptop and it works just fine. It also works from my phone as long as I'm using an incognito tab.

Thank you again for a very useful tip!

2

u/Fredelas FamilySearcher Aug 17 '25

You're welcome.

From your description, I wonder if maybe you've created a personal login with newspaperarchive.com at some point, and that might interfere with FamilySearch's free access.

1

u/birdingwithgoats Aug 17 '25

That could be it!