Newspapers on Microfilm

Note: Date Range is not always completely contiguous.

Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society also has a few reels of miscellaneous newspapers which include a small amount of the Pekin Tazewell Republican, Pekin Time, Mason City Journal, Fulton Banner, Fulton Gazette, Mackinaw Gazette, Tazewell County Republican, Pekin Evening Post, Bloomington Bulletin, Bloomington Democratic News, Lincoln Sentinel, and the Peoria Register.

We are continually adding to our collection of the Pekin Daily Times. If you need to see a newer issue than our current coverage (see table above), the Pekin Public Library has the Times on microfilm through current issues.  If you live out of town, you can use our research services to have us look up an obituary for you at the public library.

We also have an assortment of other newspapers from other areas of Illinois—here's a list of our newspaper inventory as cataloged by the Illinois Newspaper Project.

Other Newspaper Resources

The Morton Public Library offers the Morton Newspaper Archives— a digital database of local Morton and Tazewell newspapers dating back to 1909.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (ALPL) Newspaper Microfilm Collection has more than 5,000 newspaper titles preserved on nearly 100,000 reels of microfilm. The Library holds newspaper titles from every one of Illinois' 102 counties.  Many date from the early nineteenth century, including the earliest newspaper published in Illinois, the Illinois Herald from Kaskaskia (1814). The Library still subscribes to more than 300 current newspaper titles. 

If you can't visit the ALPL, you can have your local library borrow the microfilm through inter-library loan.  There is a limit of five reels per researcher.  Requests for newspaper microfilm should include the name of the city, title of newspaper, and dates needed.

ALPL administered & staffed the Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) until 1995 when the project was transitioned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

The purpose of the Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) is “to identify, catalog, collect, preserve, and digitize Illinois newspapers.”

The INP team traveled throughout Illinois inventorying and cataloging collections held by libraries and repositories, private organizations, and individuals. The team cataloged the Society's collection in October 2001.

INP hosts a web-based searchable database listing all the newspapers discovered and preserved through the project. If you select "Tazewell" as the county you will find almost 100 different titles.  Click on any newspaper's title and you will be taken to a list of all repositories that have the newspaper in their collection.  Of course, date coverage can vary from repository to repository.

If you have newspapers not yet microfilmed, INP is still accepting donations.  Please contact the University of Illinois History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library if you are interested in, or have any questions about, making a donation.

In 2007, the INP received their last grant for identifying and cataloging location of newspapers archives—completing its work in 2010.  In 2009, the INP received its first round of funding to participate in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH).

The INP team is now charged with selecting and digitizing historically significant Illinois newspapers—to be permanently maintained by the Library of Congress via the Chronicling America database.

One hundred thousand pages of Illinois newsprint, published before 1923, will be digitized during each two-year cycle of grant funding.

As of September 2017, the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection (IDNC) contained 111 newspaper titles, 132,668 issues comprising 1,440,499 pages and 6,887,660 articles.  Here's a current list of the Newspapers and current list of Counties Covered in the digital collection.  Access to the collection is totally free.

The IDNC collection is searchable.  For instance, type “obituary” in the search bar to explore obituaries across every publication in the collection. To search for an individual, enter the name in quotes, for example “Abraham Lincoln.”  Click on the Search link in the navigation bar to use advanced search tools.

Advanced Search allows you to search by the person’s name, the publication, its print location and the date, or date range to identify relevant issues.  If you know the name of the publication and the date that it was published, please use the browse by title and date tools to find the issue, and search through the pages for any photographs included.

If you see errors while browsing the collection, IDNC asks you to please edit the text to reflect the way you see it on the screen.