Webinar – Using Virginia Chronicle: An Introduction to the Library of Virginia’s Digital Newspaper Collection with Kelley Ewing [11 Jun 2025]

From birth, graduation, and marriage announcements to general articles, society columns and obituaries, newspapers provide a rich supply of material for genealogical research. Virginia Chronicle, the Library of Virginia’s freely accessible and searchable database of over 6 million newspaper pages, contains an immense amount of genealogical information to discover. The Virginia Chronicle webinar will be an in-depth exploration of the database to ensure you get the most out of using it for your research. It will cover Virginia Chronicle’s helpful tools, demonstrate various search strategies, and navigate through its special features with time at the end for questions and discussion. It will also briefly touch upon other digital newspaper resources you can access with a Library of Virginia library card or by visiting the Library.

Kelley has worked with the Virginia Newspaper Program (VNP) at the Library of Virginia for over 25 years. Since its creation in 1993 as part of the NEH initiative the United States Newspaper Program, the VNP has worked to locate, inventory, catalog, microfilm, conserve and digitize newspapers published throughout the commonwealth. Along with cataloging the newspaper collections of the largest repositories in the state, Kelley and her colleagues traveled to every city and county in Virginia, visiting libraries, colleges and universities, museums, historical societies, and publishing offices in the pursuit of previously undiscovered newspapers. Since 2008, Kelley has managed Virginia Chronicle, the Library of Virginia’s digital newspaper repository. She holds an MA in History from Virginia Commonwealth University.