Yesterday’s and today’s posts have become a double header! So many new and terrific resources are turning up online that I have to admit I sometimes just happen to stumble across them.

Today’s GeneaGem, The Gateway to Oklahoma History, is one of those stumbles. If you follow my blog, you already know that many of my husband’s immediate family had deep Oklahoma roots and that, until recently, finding Oklahoma records wasn’t the easiest task.

At first, I thought that this website was strictly one for digital newspapers – I was wrong!

This is a partnership between the Oklahoma Historical Society and the University of North Texas (yes, Texas – not Oklahoma) and it is an active project.

Digital newspapers aren’t its only offering, by far. In case you are thinking that you could just go to Chronicling America for the newspapers, you could do just that. However, you’d be missing out on many other collections INCLUDING newspapers on this site that ARE NOT in the Chronicling America collection. I have compared them and, while some newspapers are the same, the Gateway has some that are not on the Library of Congress website.

Besides newspapers, what else can be found on The Gateway to Oklahoma History? Well, the gateway itself is the digitized newspaper collection. Use the link to the Research Center to find many other treasures held by the Oklahoma Historical Society.

There is a little of everything that a family historian might want to explore – city directories, biographies, photographs, land and military records, vital records and Native American records. A little of everything, so if you have Oklahoma roots, you need to check out the website immediately!

Back to the Gateway itself for a minute. I tried to find a list of all the Oklahoma newspapers that are in the historical society collection online, but couldn’t locate one. I did search for Caddo County newspapers, as a sampling, and 400 hits came up, covering both modern newspapers and historical issues. The historical issues are the ones digitized.

I also looked for a few individual historical newspaper titles to compare to Chronicling America.

Just a few of the papers that are not on Chronicling America, but are on The Gateway to Oklahoma History include The Enid Daily Eagle, The Daily Transcript and The Norman Transcript, all of which had stories about the Stufflebean-Sturgell branch of the family and which would not have been found if I had only checked Chronicling America.

The added bonus of the rest of the Oklahoma Historical Society makes this well worth a look for Okie family records.