Est. 1998 · Chicago · Independent & family-owned

Every issue since 1690, searchable to the line.

Meridian indexes 42.6 million pages of American newsprint — births, obituaries, legal notices, shipping tables, weather — from 3,141 county collections. Machine-read, then corrected line by line by 14,202 volunteers.

“walleye derby” · Walker, Minn.· Aldrich, Helena · 1918· “germ proof” · editorials 1918–20

42,618,507Pages digitized

1,914Distinct titles

3,141Counties covered

1690–2004Coverage span

01 — The Catalog

Organized like a library, not a search engine.

Every title is cataloged the way a county historical society would shelve it: by the place it served, the records it kept, and the week it arrived from the scanner. Browse starts from any of the three.

By region · titles

New England212

Mid-Atlantic384

The South441

Midwest512

Great Plains187

Mountain West96

Pacific & territories82

By record

Birth & baptismal notices
Marriages & engagements
Obituaries & death notices
Legal, probate & sheriff’s sales
Shipping, rail & telegraph
Editorials & letters to the editor
Weather & river stages

New this month

The Astorian

Astoria, Oreg. · 1873–1888 · 4,102 pp.

Freedmen’s Herald

Charleston, S.C. · 1866–1872 · 1,388 pp.

Svenska Tribunen

Minneapolis, Swedish · 1892–1920 · 22,540 pp.

02 — Specimen

One page, as we read it.

Raw OCR guesses. Volunteers correct proper nouns against the page image; every correction is signed and dated. This is a real result for the query “Aldrich,” Duluth, 1918 — matched terms underlined.

Duluth News-Tribune · Sunday, March 3, 1918 · Page 11, column 3

Mrs. Helena Aldrich, pioneer of the west end, dies at 84

Mrs. Aldrich, relict of the late Harvey Aldrich and among the first women to settle on the west side of the bay, died Thursday at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Johanna Parmelee, 2212 West Third street. She was 84 years of age and had been in failing health since Christmas.

The deceased was born Helena Vogel in Milwaukee in 1834, and came with her parents by ox-team to Duluth in 1856, when the settlement counted eleven white families. She taught the first school on the west end, and was for forty years a member of the First Methodist congregation.

— continued on page 14, column 1

Collection: St. Louis County, Minn. · Reel 2,214 · OCR line 34,891 of 61,203 · Corrected by R. Soini, March 2023

03 — Rates

Reading is free. Keeping costs $19.

A rate card, not a pricing page. Every tier reads the same catalog; the difference is what you can carry out of the reading room.

Reader

For the curious and the occasional lookup. No card required.

Free

10 pages / month · watermarked facsimiles · full OCR text of every page · citation strings included

Researcher ※

For genealogists, historians, and the properly obsessed.

$19 / month

unlimited pages · print-ready 400-dpi facsimiles · no watermark · priority digitization votes · cancel anytime

Institution

For libraries, schools, and newsrooms. Billed annually.

from $1,400 / year

IP-range or proxy access · full corpus API · MARC records · usage statistics · dedicated correction queue

※ Most subscribed tier, three years running. Institutions may trial any title for 60 days before signing.

04 — Questions

Asked often.

How accurate is the OCR?: Raw machine reading averages 94% character accuracy — fine for modern type, poor for 1870s broken-letter presswork. After volunteer correction, proper nouns verify at 99.1%. Volunteers correct roughly 12,000 lines a week, and you can flag a bad line from any page in one click.
Can I cite Meridian pages in published work?: Yes. Every page carries a ready-made citation in Chicago and MLA styles, down to the column, with the holding library’s imprint. Generated strings are checked against the current Chicago Manual (18th ed.) each January.
Why does coverage stop at 2004?: Rights. Later issues remain with their publishers or successor companies, and we license decade windows as they come free. The 1990s were released in full this past February; the 2000s are in negotiation.
Will you digitize a paper I care about?: Probably, eventually. Researcher subscribers vote on a priority queue of 214 requested titles; the top three each month go to the scanners. Institutions can sponsor a title directly and receive first archival copies.
What is your takedown policy?: We honor requests from publishers, rights-holders, and immediate family within 30 days, and we state the reason for each removal in the catalog record. Eleven pages have been taken down in twenty-eight years; the register is public.