History buffs, genealogists, librarians, teachers, students and researchers have reason to smile. The search for information just got so much easier.
The Akron Beacon Journal, its weekly predecessor, the Summit County Beacon, and four defunct Akron publications have been added to Newspapers.com, an online database operated by Ancestry.com.
The Utah-based website digitizes historical newspaper microfilm and allows readers to browse old articles and conduct specific searches of names and dates. It contains more than 5,300 newspapers from the 1700s to the present with nearly 300 million pages available for research.
All that information is now available at your fingertips via computer or smartphone. In cinematic terms, this is the equivalent of the ape man touching the monolith and gaining instant knowledge in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Among the publications of local interest that are available for research or perusal on Newspapers.com:
• Akron Beacon Journal, 1872-2017, 2.99 million pages.
• The Summit County Beacon, 1840-1904, 14,281 pages.
• Akron City Times, 1884-1889, 1,294 pages.
• Akron Daily Democrat, 1892-1902, 14,691 pages.
• Akron Times-Democrat, 1900-1902, 1,197 pages.
• Akron Evening Times, 1913-1920, 29,544 pages.
The website also has plans to digitize the Akron Times-Press (1925-1938), the Beacon Journal’s main competitor, which folded after the two newspapers merged.