The Free Lance began on 27 January 1885 published by the Free Lance Newspaper and Job Printing Company, John W. Woltz, managing editor. John Woltz died in 1893 and was replaced by W. Seymour White. In 1896 the Free Lance was enlarged to six pages. In 1926 the Free Lance and the Daily Star were merged into the Free Lance Star, whose publication continues today.
The index was prepared by Robert Hodge. The twice-weekly (until 1893), four-page, six-column (or more at later dates) issues were scanned for items deemed of value to the LOCAL historian and genealogist. The index begins in 1885. Each entry consists of essentially four parts: Name, Reason for being, Publication date, and Page/Column numbers. Bob Hodge did not record the page and column numbers before 1897. Names included in lists (schools, fair awards, socials) were not indexed after 1896, but notations identify where these lists may be found. County columns were not indexed for all names, only for deaths and marriages. These contain 'news notes' about residents' actitivities. Although Robert Hodge indicates that he indexed 1896, the paper copy could not be located, and that year is not presently included in this index. Bob stopped his index of The Free Lance with 10 May 1900. The electronic version was created by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College by scan ning a copy of the text and then modifying the format to fit a table. Comments, or corrections to this index should be sent to Gary Stanton at Mary Washington College. gstanton@umw.edu
To Search The Free Lance 1885-1900 please mash this button.
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If you prefer, or if you have difficulty accessing this database you can right-click the download button and bring the data to your machine as a tab-delimited text file and open the file in your spread sheet program. Be certain to set your fields to text before you open this file in Microsoft Excel or it will assume all dates are twentieth century. download
URL http://departments.umw.edu/hipr/www/fredericksburg/newspapers/frla.htm
Last Update: 3 Nov 2006
Name: Gary Stanton, Dept of Historic Preservation
Email: gstanton@umw.edu