An epic project of nearly half a million pages, the Winnetka Newspapers project features beautiful, colour images scanned from primary paper copies. The resulting blend of public domain and copyrighted material provides a deep dive and insight into the Winnetka, Illinois area.
Great Lakes History
The Great Lakes History site brings together thousands of multimedia items from special collections, vessel records, and shipping history from organizations around the Great Lakes, making it one of the largest Great Lakes Maritime History databases.
Scugog Area Newspapers
A multi-year project that brings newspapers from Lake Scugog, Port Perry and the surrounding area online providing access to Central Ontario’s history as far back as 1857. A project steered by the Lake Scugog Historical Society, this collection spotlights one of the longest running papers in Ontario – the Port Perry Star – as well as contemporary community magazines and other newspapers.
Women’s Institutes Portal
This portal, launched March 31, 2018, is a multi-agency collection. It allows the researcher, in one site, to search the Women’s Institute (WI) documents found in the many archives, museums, libraries, and other organizations across the Province of Ontario in Canada, as well as the main collection at FWIO’s Virtual Archives. Researchers will learn about the rich community histories in Ontario, conduct family research, and discover the extensive documentation and community work of WI Members.
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Abolitionist Newspapers
As one of the first places for fugitives from slavery to end up after their travels on the Underground Railroad, and a place where many people called for a new Black utopia, Ontario has a rich history of Black and Abolitionist publishing. The Abolitionist Newspaper site includes four titles: The Voice of the Fugitive, The Voice of the Bondsman, The Provincial Freeman and The True Royalist and Weekly Intelligencer. All are fully searchable and the site also includes background information about the publications.
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Illinois Newspapers
An aggregate site that brings together full run newspapers and index records from 6 of our Illinois VITA Collections. The Illinois Newspapers collection includes more than 100,000 BMDs and thousands of newspaper issues from the Greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, Libertyville, Algonquin Area, Downers Grove, Glenview, Highland Park and McHenry.
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INK Newspapers
The INK portal is a one stop source for full-page Ontario newspapers: the list of titles include some full-run digital newspapers from VITA collections, plus others that have been digitized and shared by the University of Windsor, mainly representing South-Western Ontario. A list of unique titles is available here.
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Ontario Community Newspapers
The Ontario Community Newspapers portal brings together different kinds of newspaper content from across our VITA client collections including issues, full runs of publications, clippings, index records, BMDs and other orphan works from community newpspapers. All Ontario-based VITA collections of newspaper indexes, clippings, or full-run digitized newspaper pages automatically flow into the OCN portal for a one-search end-user experience. The Ontario Community Newspaper portal provides access to millions of newspaper pages and is one of the largest publicly accessible newspaper portals in the world.
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OurOntario.ca
The OurOntario.ca portal is a unique service in Ontario and Canada: a one-stop search portal for hundreds of heritage organizations’ collections. The award-winning OurOntario.ca brings together not only items uploaded through our customizable VITA platform for digital heritage collections, but also content from other organizations that have shared their metadata with us. Genealogists, heritage specialists, students, historians, scholars, designers, and researchers of all ages use the portal to discover and connect with content that traces Ontario’s history back to before the War of 1812 and up to the present day.
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Ontario Genealogical Society Collections
Migrated from an aging InMagic database, the OGS collection is invaluable to genealogical and family history researchers from around the world. The collection includes cemetery records, family history catalogue records, as well as branch catalogue records.