There's a National Subway Day, You Say?

Novoslobodskaya Station, Russian Metro
by Alex 'Florstein' Fedorov, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46392339

I was talking with a friend a couple of months ago and we started comparing notes on which subway systems we had each traveled on.  Somehow my mind went from that to thinking that could be a fun subject to blog about, then to wondering whether there was any sort of official "national subway day."  I Googled it and found that yes, indeed, someone had declared a National Subway Day on November 3, 2015.  That also seems to have been the only day it was celebrated, but I took it as an excuse to blog on the topic anyway.

I'm not sure that subways are my favorite form of transportation, but I don't mind using them, and I've been on several.  In no particular order:

Moscow, Russia Metro, 1982:  At the time I was there, it was still the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, one constituent member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  And the Metro (pronounced mye-tro) was beautiful.  Each station was a work of art, and we were told that was the intention.  I don't recall that it ran late.  One incident that happened to me when using the system was when a friend and I were leaving the station and standing on the escalator as it gently took us back to fresh air.  For some reason I had my friend's passport in my hand and was looking at it in detail, when one of the people ahead of us, who appeared to have been drinking heavily, suddenly stumbled backward and fell onto me.  Not only did I catch him and not fall myself, I didn't even drop the passport.  But my friend and I took a few steps backward, just in case it should happen again (it didn't).

Paris, France Métro, 1983:  I don't remember as much detail about the Métro in Paris, probably because whlie I was there I was dead broke and walked almost everywhere rather than pay for transportation.  But I did ride it a couple of times.  I don't recall that it was awful or great, just kind of there.

London, England Underground, 1996:  The Tube, as it is commonly called, has a reputation all its own.  People ride it just to say they've done so.  I rode it to get from one point to another, but I did notice the signs saying, "Mind the Gap," which are well known.  When I was going from the Prime Meridian to the Tower of London, I should have taken the Tube, but I didn't realize how far I was going to have to walk.  By the time I got to the Tower, it was closing for the day, and all I did was walk around it.  So that was one time I really blew it by not taking the subway.

New York City Subway, 1997 and 2005:  Another transportation system famous in its own way, the New York City Subway has the most stations and is one of the busiest and longest in the world.  In 2005 I wanted to visit a cousin who lived in the heart of Manhattan, and she convinced me not to even think of driving but to take the subway instead.  So I did.  It was a nice trip there and back.  I also took it once with my sister when I was visiting her in New Jersey, because she found out I had never been on it.  So we rode into The City and walked around for a while.  We somehow fortuitously ended up on 57th Avenue and I was able to show her around The Compleat Strategist, an adventure games store that carried products from the company I was working for at the time (this was in 1997).  She is still the only family member who actually got excited to see my name in print, jumping up and down in the store.

Washington, D.C. Metro, 2000 and 2011:  The outstanding feature of the Metro in DC is how huge the tunnels are.  They are absolutely cavernous.  I was told that the reason for their ridiculous size is that they're supposed to be emergency shelters for people if something really horrible happens outside.  But that doesn't make sense, unless the people are supposed to stand on each others' shoulders, because most of the space is up.  So I suspect the real reason is something else entirely.  But it's a nice system, and I definitely enjoyed riding it.

Montreal, Quebec Metro, about 1999:  I traveled to Montreal once for work, and while there I learned about the underground transportation systems.  Not only is there a subway, but there are underground walkways between buildings so that people can move around in the dead of winter.  I thought that was pretty smart of them.  I don't remember anything in particular about the Metro, so it couldn't have been bad.

Boston, Massachusetts Subway, 1991, 1992, 1993:  The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) looks and feels ancient, or at least it did when I was using it.  I used to go to Boston at least once a year and took the subway a lot.  The cars always felt rickety, and when they careened around curves you worried whether you were going to go airborne.  The cars seem to just barely fit in the tunnels.  I heard rumors (never substantiated) that some people who were working had been crushed.  Not a friendly system.  I have one friend who knew the system inside out, backward and forward, to the extent that he could figure out in his head that if we went two stops past where we wanted and then came back one stop, we could walk far fewer stairs to get to the street.  He was amazing.

San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit:  The subway system with which I am most familiar is BART (I love acronyms!).  Not only did I live in the Bay Area for 28 years, but I worked as a train operator at BART.  I have to admit, I loved riding BART around, especially in San Francisco, because I hated driving in San Francisco.  BART is a great system.  I even wrote two blog posts about using BART to get to genealogically important research sites (in San Francisco and in the East Bay)!

So that comes to eight systems.  Hmm, I thought it was more than that.  I guess I need to get out there and ride a few more!

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Late Addition, December 31, 2024

San Francisco Muni Metro:  For some reason, it recently occurred to me that I had ridden not only BART in San Francisco, but also San Francisco's Muni Metro, the light rail vehicle system that is partly a subway and partly above ground.  So in the interest of completeness, I'm adding it now.  The main reason I used the system was when Sutro Library, the genealogy-focused branch of the California State Library system, was moved from a location to which you almost had to drive to two floors in the CSU San Francisco library, which was reachable by, you guessed it, Muni Metro.  And as I mentioned above when writing about BART, I hated driving in San Francisco, so given an option to avoid that, I very quickly did so.  I was never a fan of Muni buses, but I liked the rail system.  I probably took it about half a dozen times out to Sutro.  And it is a totally different system from BART, so that brings my total to nine.

Newspapers, Newspapers, Newspapers!

I have been meaning to post another update of what has been added to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page for a while now, but I've been distracted by a lot of other projects.  I didn't realize it had been seven months since I last posted!  I'm trying to catch up, though, so here are some of the most recent additions.  One new country, Lithuania, and new state, Kansas, have been added to the list.  Several of the new archives are being created by one of two companies, Advantage Preservation (which does them with free access) or Newspapers.com (which makes them available for a subscription fee).

• Australia:  Honi Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney (New South Wales), has been digitized for 1929–1990.

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Prince George Public Library has eight newspapers, including the student newspaper for the College of New Caledonia, on its site, ranging from 1909–1965.

• British Columbia, Canada:  Simon Fraser University has a collection of digitized newspapers online, including the student newspaper The Peak and one group called simply "More Newspapers."

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Thompson-Nicola Regional District library is digitizing newspapers from the Kamloops area and has a selection available covering 1882–2014.

• Cuba:  Diario de la Marina is available through the University of Florida's newspaper collection. Years covered range between 1844 and 1961, but coverage is not continuous.

• England:  The Church Times, an Anglican newspaper, has an online archive dating back to its first issue in 1863 and including more than 8,000 issues.

• France:  Two collections of images from Excelsior, a weekly publication that published 20+ photographs in every issue during World War I, are available.

• Italy:  Nine months of the 1885 issues of Il Secolo, published in Milan, are on the Florida State University digital archives site.  The press release I read suggested that more issues will be coming at some point in the future.

• Lithuania:  A new country!  Someone has digitized the Vilna Provincial Gazette and posted it on the Internet Archive.  The years covered are 1838–1917, with a few years missing.  This was published while Lithuania was under the control of the Russian Empire.

• Mexico, Arizona, California, and Texas (under Worldwide category):  The Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press collection includes newspapers from Tucson, Arizona; Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; El Paso, Texas; and Sonora, Mexico.  The archive goes from the mid-1800's to the 1970's.

• New Zealand:  The Southern Regional News Index covers the Dunedin and Otago area for 1851 to the present.

• United Kingdom:  The Gazette has created an instructional video on how to search and use the online Gazette archives.

• California:  The GLBT Historical Society of Northern California has an online searchable database of obituaries (not just an index) for the Bay Area Reporter, a weekly newspaper covering the GLBT community primarily in the San Francisco Bay area, for the years 1972 to the present.  The Bay Area Reporter itself has an online archive that begins with 2005 and is working on digitizing its issues going back to 1971.

• California:  The St. Helena Public Library has the St. Helena Star from 1874–2014 available for free.

• California:  The now defunct San Fernando Valley Genealogical Society posted a collection of vital records abstracts on RootsWeb for Valley newspapers covering 1911–1945.

• Connecticut:  The Shelton Library has two collections of newspaper clippings.  The "Library Scrapbook" has clippings from multiple newspapers from 1923–1930 relating to the Plumb Memorial Library.  The "Servicemen's Scrapbook of Shelton Men & Women Serving in World War" has clippings from the Evening Sentinel from 1943–1945, so apparently those servicemen were serving in World War II.

• District of Columbia:  The Capital is online for 1871–1880 and is said to be a great source for research in the Reconstruction period.

• District of Columbia:  Quicksilver Times (1973–1985) and Unicorn Times (1969–1972) are available from the Washington, DC Public Library.

• Georgia:  The Macon Daily Telegraph for 1860–1865 is in the American Civil War Newspapers database at Virginia Tech.

• Illinois:  The Lake Forester for 1899–1940 is on the Lake Forest Library site.

• Indiana:  The AIM Media Indiana archive, which has eleven newspapers, is a pay site created via a Newspapers.com partnership.

• Iowa:  Central College in Pella has ten collections of student newspapers and yearbooks covering 1876–2006, but there are some gaps in coverage.

• Iowa:  West Branch newspapers the Local Record and Times, from 1866–1934, are on the West Branch Public Library.

• Kansas:  A new state!  There is an obituary index for Rush County at the Barnard Library site.  It covers 1878–1951.  Copies of the obituaries can be ordered from the library.

• Kentucky:  The Lawrence County Public Library has an online obituary index for the Big Sandy News that covers 1885 to the present.

• Louisiana: The New Orleans Christian Advocate, a Methodist newspaper, is only for 1850–1946.

• Louisiana:  Scanned ads from former slaves looking for family members and friends lost during slavery which were published in the New Orleans Southwestern Christian Advocate (1879–1885) — which does not appear to be related to the previously mentioned paper — are available for free online.

• Maine:  Digital Maine has the Old Orchard Mirror, a newspaper published only during the summer, for the years 1900, 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1914.

• Maryland:  The Annapolis Capital has been digitized and placed online by NewspaperArchive.com on a pay site.  The collection nominally goes from 1887–2016, but it goes straight from 1887 to 1918–1919 and then to 1929.  It looked continuous from then on.

• Massachusetts:  The Memorial Hall Library in Andover has three newspapers covering 1853–1925.

• Massachusetts:  The Newburyport Public Library has ten digitized newspapers available for free on its site, courtesy of Advantage Preservation.

• Massachusetts:  The Portuguese-American Digital Newspaper Collections, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, includes Portuguese-language newspapers from California, Hawaii, and Massachusetts.

• Massachusetts:  The (Mattapoisett) Wanderer, which also serves Marion and Rochester in southeastern Massachusetts, has an online archive for its entire publication history, 1992–2016, housed at the Internet Archive.

• Minnesota:  Two union newspapers, the Minneapolis Labor Review (1907–current) and St. Paul Union Advocate (unsure of years covered), are now online.

• Missouri:  The Houston Herald has been digitized and placed online courtesy of Newspapers.com for 1881–present and is a pay site.

• Missouri:  There are online indices for death notices appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch, along with instructions on how to order copies.

• Montana:  The Montana Newspapers project has some dupblication with the Montana Memory Project but includes many more newspapers.  The years range from 1885 to 2015.

• New Jersey:  The Belmar Historical Society has the Coast Echo and Coast Advertiser for 1881–1974 in PDF and searchable.

• New Jersey:  The New Jersey Hills Media Group has partnered with Newspapers.com to present three newspapers on a pay site.

• New Jersey:  The Woodbridge Public Library has digitized eleven local newspapers ranging from 1876–1970.

• New Mexico:  The White Sands Missile Range published its own newspapers, which cover 1950–1990.  There is a list of the issues that are missing, so if you have an old issue, maybe you can help!

• New York:  A new collection of four Staten Island newspapers has been made available, with plans for more to come.

• North Carolina:  The Nubian Message (1992–2005), the black student newspaper of North Carolina State University, has been digitized and placed online.

• Ohio:  The Stark County District Library has digitized eight newspapers in partnership with Advantage Preservation.

• Ohio:  The WestLife Observer (2013–2015) and the Westlake Bay Village Observer (2006–2015) are online at Westlake Library site.

• Oklahoma:  The Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College student newspaper, The Norse Wind, is online for 1948–2007.

• Virginia:  The Library of Virginia has the Charlottesville Daily Progress available for 1893–1964.

• Virginia:  The Prince William County Library System has a local newspaper index for 1993–present for three newspapers that have no other index available.

• Virginia:  The Pulaski County Library newspaper archive has five newspapers that range from 1893 to 2015.

• Virginia:  The Handley Regional Library System has an obituary index for the Winchester Star for 1896–1914.  This is a work in progress, and more information is being added to it.

• Wisconsin:  The Lake Geneva Public Library has searchable indices for obituaries, birth announcements, and local people in the news.  The site does not state which newspapers or years are covered, but an announcement from NEHGS said the obituaries were taken from the Lake Geneva Regional News and Lake Geneva Herald.  The local people in the news database iincludes the code LGNT, which I believe stands for Lake Geneva News Tribune.

• Multistate:  The Swedish American Newspapers collection, hosted at the Minnesota Historical Society, includes 28 newspapers from California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.  Total years covered in the database are 1859–2007.

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the funders for the Chronicling America digitization project, announced that the years which can be funded are expanding from 1836–1922 to 1690–1963.  This means that eventually we should see a much broader range of historical newspapers on the Chronicling America site.  You can read the press release here.