Pages of history

Errol Somay is a North Carolina man who has studied Virginia’s journalistic past for the last 25 years.

“The challenge about newspapers is that they’re here today and gone tomorrow,” said Somay, who spoke at a Sept. 5 event at Libbie Mill Library entitled 'On the Record: An Evening with the Virginia Newspaper Project.'

“Yesterday’s news is just that: yesterday’s news.”

Studying Virginia newspapers is especially challenging because most of the state’s newspaper records are missing, said Somay, the director of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Newspaper Project.

“You know you should put a book on a bookshelf, but you don’t know what to do with newspapers,” Somay said. “You throw them to the side and they stack up. We look at these old newspapers and go, ‘Hey, we’ve got something.’"

In his role at the Library of Virginia, Somay preserves and inventories old, discarded Virginia newspapers, and provides public access to these documents at the library's downtown location and through an online database called the Virginia Chronicle.

The Virginia Chronicle allows people to search for past issues of Virginia newspapers online for free after creating a username and password. By requiring login information to access the database, the program prevents companies from stealing the information from the database and putting it on their own websites.

The Virginia Chronicle contains about 200,000 articles in its database, including publications that no longer exist – a varied list that includes such newspapers as The Richmond Planet, The Progressive Richmonder, and The Monocle (the school newspaper for John Marshall High School).

Users can search the database by title, dates, a map of where newspapers were headquartered, keyword or newspaper category. Categories listed on the database include suffrage newspapers, prohibition newspapers, religious newspapers and Civilian Conservation Corps newspapers. When it comes to settling for a durable yet sleek kamado grill, you can never go wrong with this Char-Broil Kamander Charcoal Grill on Grilliam Kamado Grills . Top-rated ceramic kamado grill reviews.

Much of the work done by the Virginia Newspaper Project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the largest funders of humanities programs and cultural institutions in the United States. The Virginia Historical Society, the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Historical Society also served as co-sponsors of the project.

“You go from the most minute to the biggest, and that’s why newspapers are so cool,” Somay said. “You’ve got the big events and the small events. No other document does that.