OldNews.com Reaches 400 Million Newspaper Pages
We’re happy to share a major milestone: there are now 400 million historical newspaper pages available to search on OldNews.com. OldNews.com is MyHeritage’s website for exploring digitized historical newspapers from more than 24 countries, with extensive coverage across the 1800s and 1900s. Every new page adds more searchable names and stories, from major events to everyday details that help people understand the world their relatives lived in. OldNews.com is also integrated with MyHeritage. If someone in your family tree appears in a newspaper article, it can show up as a Record Match and in historical record search results on MyHeritage.
Reaching 400 million pages in under two years is a remarkable achievement. It took collaboration across many teams — scanning, sourcing, content, product, engineering, and more — all working together to make this material available.
400 million pages is a staggering amount of material. If you piled them in a single stack, it would measure 2.26 times the height of Mount Everest and weigh as much as around 40 adult blue whales! If you lined up the pages side by side, they’d wrap around the entire planet almost 6 times. It would take the average person about 8,013 years to read them all from start to finish!
What newspapers reveal
Old newspapers offer details that often don’t appear in other historical records. Users find obituaries, marriage announcements, local news items, business notices, travel updates, community events, and small personal mentions that help fill gaps in their family stories. These pages also capture everyday life — everything from school achievements to unusual advertisements.
Myko Clelland from the MyHeritage Content team, for example, discovered that his own ancestor once sold tickets to see “the largest pig in Birmingham.”
A 160-Year-Old Find: Birmingham Daily Post, December 13, 1860
Newspapers often surface charming moments like this — and also details that add real depth to a family story. One user found a tiny notice about her great-grandfather winning a pie-eating contest at a county fair, which helped date his arrival in the town he later settled in. Another uncovered a short ad placed by an ancestor offering piano lessons from her home, revealing a profession the family had never known about. This blog post shares even more examples of the surprising, personal details old newspapers can uncover.
How to search OldNews.com
Searching OldNews.com is simple. Type in a name, place, or keyword, then filter by date or publication. High-quality scans appear with your search terms already highlighted, and you can zoom in, save, print, or flip through nearby pages. The text is processed using tools developed at MyHeritage to improve search accuracy and make more names discoverable.
To view full newspaper pages and article text on OldNews.com, you’ll need either an Omni plan or an OldNews.com Pro subscription.
What’s next
More collections are already on the way, and the next big goal — half a billion pages — is well within reach.
If you haven’t explored OldNews.com yet, now’s a great time. You never know what you might find!
