One Hundred Years Ago

 1923

   Since my last few posts have been about the present, I will now look back through the London Free Press to a time that was clearly different.  The day landed upon happened to be May 24 and "Empire Day" is no more and mostly forgotten. This curriculum also appears a bit outmoded.

      We no longer have a 'local' newspaper and one reason for that is there not enough advertising to support one. Advertising was important back in 1923.

Here is a larger version which indicates that advertising was the "Aladdin" of the day in 1923, but replaced later on by genies such as Kijiji and Craigslist.

Sources: 

  One often needs a genie to find digitized editions of older newspapers and not many free digitized pages of the LFP exist as far as I know. I found a few on Canadiana. The reasons for this vary, but often it is the case that there are commercial ones. Before you pay money, however, or spend time (lots of it) sitting in the library at a microform reader, do check around to make sure your community paper is not available via the Internet. Genealogists have been more helpful than librarians in assisting those interested in finding local newspapers. Here is the place to start and if you scroll down you will find Canadian newspapers listed by province: "Newspaper Links," The Ancestor Hunt.com. And, as usual, Wikipedia is very useful: "List of Online Newspaper Archives." 

  Given that this post is a slight one, here are some other suggestions and remember that more papers are added daily. 

For the U.S. start with "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers." Canada is generally behind other countries in undertaking a national digital approach, but you can find provincial ones: Alberta and British Columbia. For a local Ontario effort see: "INK-ODW Newspaper Collection." 

  Google started to digitize newspapers (and every thing else), but was forced to stop.

The Bonus: 

   One fellow who has not stopped is located close by in Fulton, New York where among the over 50 million digitized pages you will find many from Canadian newspapers. Tom Tryniski is his name and he has done from his house what many librarians have not been able to do from their libraries. Don't be fooled by the look of the website because if you are searching for something or someone, you are likely to find them here: "Old Fulton New York Post Cards."