Among the items that Jerry Blaney donated was a fifty-five-year-old copy of The New Era newspaper dated March 31, 1966.
Our collection of old Riverton and Palmyra newspapers has been an invaluable resource in our research into local events and people.
If you ever stumble into a stash of old local newspapers, a single copy, or even some cut-out clippings PULLEEEESE rescue them and give them to the Historical Society of Riverton, or at least let us scan them. -JMc
Macmillan.com informs that the idiom “yesterday’s news” means that the topic is something that everyone already knows about and is no longer interested in.
Let’s see.
Who or what will you find mentioned in these gazettes of bygone times?
Folks near and far often check our online resources for information on Riverton. Thanks to resident Ed Gilmore, we just added 16 more old out-of-print local newspapers to our archive.
Click on links below to see each issue.
The Palmyra News, Jan. 23, 1948
All but five of the 16 issues are ones which were not part of the Society’s original effort HSR President Betty B. Hahle started to save the vintage periodicals back in 1985-1986.
Despite some missing and incomplete issues, the project preserved on microfilm over 130 issues of four local newspapers (1894-1949) – The New Era (Riverton), The Palmyra Record, The Riverton Journal, and The Weekly News (Palmyra).
Years later, in 2012, the RFL Association and the Historical Society of Riverton worked to complete the digitization of these four locally historic newspapers so they could be made available on the web at rivertonhistory.com. See them on the Historical Newspapers page.
As anyone who has browsed the files here can attest, the image quality varies and the search feature can miss a lot. These issues just posted are clearer and can be more accurately searched.
Mr. Gilmore gave these issues to us a couple of years ago, but we did not have a way to scan the pages. I used an iPhone app called Adobe Scan to turn the pages into searchable PDFs.
While not up to the quality that we might have gotten from a $2,500 roll scanner, the Adobe Scan app produced a decent image and the text recognition is far more accurate than what we achieved on the microfilm to digital transfer.
Well, anyway, I’m excited.
The folks at adobe.com explain how it’s done here.
While they cannot compete with a scanner’s reproduction, mobile phone apps such as this or similar ones do open up the possibility of persons collaborating across the miles to add to the historical record.
If anyone else out there in cyberspace has an old hometown newspaper or other document to share, please send us a PDF we can post. -JMc
