Thanks to our partner, Museum of the Albemarle, and digitization of materials by Elizabeth City State University, nine issues of The Daily Advance (Elizabeth City, N.C.) from 1944 and 1945 along with a more complete copy of the May 30, 1877 issue of The Economist (Elizabeth City, N.C.) are now available on DigitalNC.

Prior to this batch, we did have a microfilmed copy of the May 30, 1877 issue of The Economist (Elizabeth City, N.C.) available online; however, this copy was a bit blurry, and was missing both large chunks primarily from the sides along with the whole fourth page. Though the Museum of the Albemarle’s physical copy of the nearly 150 year old paper was in much better condition than the microfilm, it also wasn’t complete.

Though it feels odd to say, we were fortune in this instance that the microfilmed copy predominately lacked outer edges, while the physical copy had several holes along the fold lines of the paper which omitted information from the middle or center areas of the pages. While the two copies separately were incomplete, the fact that when compared they were uniquely incomplete provided us the opportunity to piece together a more complete copy of the May 30, 1877 issue.

To create this (mostly) complete copy, we first had to determine for each individual page whether the microfilm or print copy would be better as the base layer. This was based primarily on the completeness and legibility of the page. Then, we evaluated this selected base layer for missing pieces. Once these were inventoried, we looked at the “other” version of the page (the one not selected to use as the base layer) to see if it had sections that were missing from the base. Unfortunately, we couldn’t just layer both versions on top of one another to easily fill in these missing pieces. If the “other” version had the pieces missing from the base layer, we had to individually crop, resize, and orient each of those filler pieces into the base layer, making sure the text lined up between the versions.

To learn more about the Museum of the Albemarle, visit their website here.

To view more materials contributed by Museum of the Albemarle visit their contributor page here.

To view more newspapers from Elizabeth City, visit our Newspaper Collection here.