LEBANON Western Star online

The Warren County Genealogical Society announced that the early issues of Lebanon’s Western Star newspaper are now available online in a searchable format. “The Western Star was published for 206 years, from Feb. 13, 1807 to Jan. 17, 2013, becoming Ohio’s oldest weekly newspaper,” explained the Society’s President, Linda Eckert.

“The issues from 1807 through 1922, more than 26,000 pages, are now available on-line at http:// ohiomemory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16007coll84,” she said. “This is the first time that any of the issues have been converted to an optical character recognition (OCR) format and placed online. This provides the public with free and efficient word-searching of the entire collection.” The Society’s Alleen Stephenson Digital Newspaper Project is dedicated to the remarkable Alleen Stephenson. For more than 60 years, she wrote a muchloved column in the Western Star about the Kings Mills community that celebrated and preserved many aspects of the county’s history. The project was made possible through the generosity of J. Todd and Rebecca Stephenson, Alleen’s son and daughter-in-law.

The project involved more than a year of microfilming, digitizing and indexing, and technical collaboration with the Ohio History Connection (formerly the “Ohio Historical Society”). The project was coordinated by Diana Linkous of the Warren County Genealogical Society.

The public is invited to visit the Society’s resource library at 406 Justice Dr. For more information, call 513-695-1144 or visit the Society’s website at http://www. co.warren.oh.us/genealogy/.