Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News archives at your fingertips
In the 1950s, Popular Mechanics predicted we would be shopping by picture-phone. Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein predicted that phones would be small enough to fit in a purse, answer simple questions and send images.
Several years ago someone predicted that our newspaper archives would be searchable online. That was a beautiful dream to those of us searching endlessly and sometimes blindly on microfilm.
Newspapers.com, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com, made archives of The Indianapolis Star since 2015 as well as a limited number of years of The Indianapolis News.
Newspapers.com has now updated the digital archive to include full editions of The Indianapolis News from 1869 to 1999.
IndyStar subscribers get access to articles between 30 days and the most recent two years for free. Click the "ARCHIVES" link on our desktop site and mobile apps.
RetroIndy gifts:The past makes a great present
If the article is more than two years old, all the usual Newspapers.com rules apply. Users are welcome to subscribe to Newspapers.com for access to additional content. Some Newspapers.com features, such as “clipping” articles to save them, will require creating a free Newspapers.com account.
A Newspapers.com basic subscription in $7.95 a month with access to over 5,100 newspapers or $19.99 a month for "publisher extras."
If you are into genealogy or historical research, then this is a feature you'll be excited about. Decades of obituaries, birth announcements, company profiles and biographies are literally right at your fingertips.
Anyone who has ever used an old clunky microfilm reader is aware of the often poor and scratched archives from years of use, but the Newspapers.com archives are taken from the original master microfilm, so both print and photos are sharp and clear.
Anyone who has ever used a microfilm machine is aware of the often murky quality of microfilm archives but the quality of the print and images from Newspapers.com is clear and printable.
Follow Star photo coordinator and RetroIndy writer Dawn Mitchell on Twitter: @dawn_mitchell61.