Newspapers are one of my absolute favorite sources when it comes to genealogy. Nothing gives you a better spotlight into a community and or a person’s life quite like a newspaper does. Wyoming had a fair number of newspapers throughout the state over time, and there are a number of excellent resources for finding them.

Of course you are going to want to examine some of the usual sites, such as Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive, and GenealogyBank. It is just good practice to see what newspaper coverage those sites have for the area you are researching. Also, check with Chronicling America from the Library of Congress, which currently has five digitized newspapers available for Wyoming:

However, the best resource for digitized newspapers from Wyoming is the Wyoming Digital Newspapers Collection. This website is provided by the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming State Archives and contains newspapers back to 1849 and over 1.1 million pages of digitized content. We are going to conduct a search for our female homesteader Susan Baily:

Our search for Susan Baily, without any other filters, returned 72 hits. As you can see, you can filter your search by exact phrase, date, county, city, and title. The first result is an article about a dance that was held in Centennial, Wyoming.

Digging a little further, we find an article about Susan’s sister, Philena Baily marring Willie Conners.

The state newspaper site is fantastic, and full of wonderful Wyoming newspapers. Have fun exploring!