The Archives

These documents are from two main sources:

  • A planned archive of many old newspaper issues; and
  • Thousands of scanned pages from the archives of the Historical Society.

To navigate the newspaper archives when they become available, we suggest using Browse by Date.

The easiest way to view the digitized History Room archives is to Browse by Collection.

Searching the Archives

To search the archives, all you need to do is type in a keyword in the search bar. If you would like to search for a phrase, enter it in quotes ("city clerk"). Keep in mind that the structured elements of a document (ie text wrapping, adjacent columns, etc) are disregarded by the indexing algorithm, so short phrases will yield more success than long ones. Unfortunately, this is an unavoidable limitation.

Some other info

The following are some drawbacks and things of general note:

  • Some OCR mistakes
  • Most scanned collections are in no particular order, or in reverse chronological order
  • Documents with several text orientations to a page are not indexed

None of these should be prohibitive to searching the archive. You can also search our archive using Google by typing: "site:belmonthistoricalsociety.com search terms". If you do notice any glaring omissions or mistakes that affect functionality, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Credits

  • All members of the Belmont Historical Society -- for decades of meticulously kept records and archives, as well as their continuous support of this project
  • City of Belmont -- for their continued cooperation, interest, and funding
  • Brad McKenna and the Wilmington Memorial Library -- for the generous donation of their platform and extensive documentation that made the assembly of this archive possible
  • Alex Derhacobian, Alexander Wang, Michael Atkin, and many others -- for their assistance in scanning documents to make this idea a reality.
  • The diligent and devoted volunteers of years past, without whose tireless efforts many years of history would have been lost.

Have fun browsing a century of local history!

          Sam Hosmer, Belmont Historical Society