The Winchester Star 1901-1972

The Winchester Star is the paper of record for the town of Winchester, Massachusetts and is a weekly publication, coming out on Friday of each week. These files contain digital images of the Star from January 4, 1901 through December 28, 1972. Newspapers become most useful to the genealogist when there is a lack of access to civil records for a community. Obituaries for example, can fill the gap when a death record cannot be found or is nonexistent. Newspapers may also provide important note material important to the biographical details of our ancestors, for instance, being mentioned  in reference to a local event, a crime, or other newsworthy story may provide color to an otherwise bland details of civil events.

The Winchester Star liked to publish items of an historical nature, from biographies of leading citizens (past and present) to items of history in reference to events which occurred in the past in Winchester. The publisher also filled his pages with photographs, and it’s possible that you may find your Winchester ancestors photo within it’s pages, albeit, a paper photograph, while not ideal, may be the only likeness you have for an ancestor. Here’s an example of one such story:

Winchester Star
Cover page of the Winchester Star Newspaper for July 10, 1903

Are Camping at Hull
On Monday morning Messrs. Roy Pratt and James Newman padded from the Winchester Boat Club to Bayside, Hull, where they joined a party of ten other Winchester boys. The party will camp at this place for a week of more, cooking their own food, doing their own washing, and enjoying themselves in true backwoods style. One large tent shelters the entire party. Among the boys are Wilder Gutterson, James Newman, Wm. Little, Harold Hovey, Robert Fernald, Philip Webber, Louis Walling, Ralph Herrick, Lawrence Symmes, Carl Apollonio, Curtis Nash, Roy Pratt. 1

For practical purposes the OCR text of the newspaper images was poorly produced and as a result, a search through the material will produce a lot of false positives, and generally not display results when there may be for the surname you’re looking for. I suggest you browse each volume, not just rely on the search. Each volume contains 12-13 weekly issues (three months worth) and a little over 100 pages.

Editions of the The Winchester Star:

Citations:

  1. Are Camping at Hull. Winchester Star, Winchester, Massachusetts. 10 July, 1903, page 1, column 3.[↩]

Surnames:
Apollonio, Fernald, Gutterson, Herrick, Hovey, Little, Nash, Newman, Pratt, Symmes, Walling, Webber,

Topics:
Newspapers,

Locations:
Middlesex County MA, Winchester Massachusetts,

Collection:
The United States Newspaper collection provides links to digital newspapers which can be found online from the historical to modern day. While most of these are free to view and download, some may not. In this case we try to provide a $ sign after the link to let you know the newspaper is found on a subscription website. We also feature transcriptions from historical newspapers when available. Also see our United States obituary collections.

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