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When I was a kid, my family was surely the best-read on the block. We spent an hour or two every evening reading.

We didn't bury our noses in Tolstoy, Faulkner or Shakespeare, though. We read the newspaper. In fact, we read several newspapers.

Kids on bicycles tossed three papers a day onto our front yard - the Kansas City Times, the Kansas City Star and our local daily newspaper; and the mailman delivered a daily paper from a town where we used to live, plus a weekly paper from my dad's little hometown.

The newspaper reading habit has stuck with me. The Tribune is high on my reading list, naturally. But, this week I've also read the Fort Wayne Sentinel, the New York Herald and the Lincoln Daily News.

Why would I be interested in the news in Indiana, New York and Nebraska? Because my ancestors lived there, and the newspapers I read were from 1891, 1867 and 1913.

Historic newspapers overflow with clues about our ancestors, but they've always been remotely inaccessible to most of us.

Old newspapers sat on dusty shelves in library, museum and newspaper office storerooms for decades. Even after millions of pages of old newspapers were microfilmed during the 20th century, tracking down the microfilm could still be as hard as finding your most elusive ancestor.

Two things, though, have made historical newspaper research much easier.

First, newspaper preservationists, ranging from local genealogists to the federal government, have accelerated efforts to locate and preserve old newspapers.

Check out the U.S. Newspaper Program (www.neh.gov/projects/usnp.html), which provides grant money to the states to catalog and preserve historic papers.

Find your ancestor's state on the USNP home page and follow links to each state's newspaper preservation site.

The Missouri site, for example, lists, by counties, the historic newspapers available on microfilm via Interlibrary loan. For $10 I can have a newspaper microfilm sent to my local library - much more convenient and cheaper than traipsing to Missouri.

Not only has locating old newspapers become more efficient, finding our ancestors' names buried in the tiny text has become easier, too. We can thank digital imagery for that.

Millions of pages of historic newspapers have been digitized and placed on the Internet. With digital text, the computer does the searching for you. This is good news for those of us who've gone nearly blind from visually scanning page after page of microfilmed text.

Digital searches have limitations, though. The poor quality and deteriorating nature of old newsprint doesn't always lead to a crisply scanned image. Text searches can overlook our ancestors' names or misread them.

So, you have to learn some tricks for searching digital newspapers, but the effort is worth it.

You can find digital newspapers all over the Internet. Newspaperarchive.com, genealogybank.com and ancestry.com are among the resources, though most of these sites charge for a subscription or image downloads.

Among the free sites are Small Town Newspapers and

Colorado Historic Newspapers.