About this Project

Newspapers have been an important and unique form of communication in American History - from colonial times to the present. They have also become our windows to the past.

Public Libraries have long recognized the needs of students, genealogists, researchers and the general public to access these historical newspapers for local history school projects, genealogy and historical research, and for the curious.

Suffolk Historic Newspapers is a centralized, searchable collection of Suffolk's newspaper heritage available to you online. Because of Suffolk County's unique geography and historical development, no one newspaper can provide complete coverage of the county. Digitizing allows searching of previously unindexed microfilm resources across multiple multiple newspapers, covering any time period. The articles can be viewed separately or as they appear on the full page. They can be printed, saved to your local computer and emailed.

• Six initial newspapers have been selected to cover nearly 100 years of Suffolk County history.
  • 1839-1859 Long Islander (Huntington)
  • 1858-1871 Corrector (Sag Harbor)
  • 1870-1883 South Side Signal (Babylon)
  • 1883-1893 Long Island Traveler (Cutchogue)
  • 1892-1904 Port Jefferson Echo (Port Jefferson)
  • 1903-1923 County Review (Riverhead)
    
• Plans of twenty-eight other county newspapers will be added, providing coverage going back as far as 1791.
  • Frothinghams Long Island Herald
  • The Easthampton Star
  • Northport Journal
  • The Patchogue Advance
    
• Suffolk County's fifty-six public libraries are working cooperatively with each other, with local and regional historical societies, and the business community to ensure the success of the Suffolk Historical Newspapers project .