Twenty-Two Million Newspaper Pages and Growing

There’s an excellent article about Tom Tryniski’s Fultonhistory.com website posted at the March 5, 2013 edition of reason.com. Fultonhistory.com is one of my very favorite websites – one that has allowed me to gather all kinds of interesting information about my Meitzler families in New York State. Currently, I get 754 hits on the name “Meitzler.”

According to the article, the site is now up to 22 million pages. It’s OCR indexed, so searching is easy. Just enter the key words (like a surname) in the search box on the upper right-hand side, and you’re off and running… Following is a teaser from the article.

One computer expert working alone has built a historic newspaper site that’s orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath.

Tryniski’s site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress’ historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page.[*] In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

Fourteen years ago, Tryniski, a retired engineer, launched his website after a friend loaned him a collection of old postcards of Fulton, New York, the town where he’s lived all his life. He decided to scan and share them online with his neighbors.

Read the full article and watch the video.

Thanks to Jim Epstein, Producer at Reason for the heads-up.