ROGERS CITY – With nearly 100 years of digitized newspapers on file, the Presque Isle District Library’s archives are helping researchers from around the county – and beyond.

The library has digitized editions of The Presque Isle Advance from 1878 to 1976, plus a number of other local papers and pages from the 40 Mile Point Lighthouse Keeper’s Log, library Director Mike Grulke said. These scanned-in documents are from the Presque Isle County Historical Museum’s collection of microfiche reproductions. While the archives aren’t online, they’re available at the library’s main branch in Rogers City, the museum and in Onaway.

These microfiche images had started to crack and scratch, and loading and searching them was a cumbersome process, Grulke said. So the library paid a downstate company $8,000 to turn the collection into searchable computer documents. Along with being easier to read, the results are also much more accessible.

“Each edition of the paper is searchable and in PDF format, so you can search by name or topic,” he said. “It’s a lot easier than what we used to have.”

Many library patrons use the archives for genealogy research, Grulke said, and he’s helped locals and people from out of town locate a relative in the archives. One woman from Oregon was so grateful to find her ancestor that she offered to buy Grulke a drink if he ever came to town.

Along with births, deaths and other official announcements, the papers also contain bits of everyday life, Grulke said. There’s official business like local government meetings, and advertisements showing what people of the era were interested in buying. The papers also are proving useful to a group researching Onaway’s Lobdell-Emery plant.

With all the historical information the newspapers contain, Grulke said the library was willing to spend its own money to have them digitized. He’d like to get them online and to as wide an audience as possible, but can’t afford to do so.

“We thought it’s important so that people could do their research locally for things like family history, or perhaps looking at the cultural changes from the past, things like that,” he said. “We thought there was a need here in the county for this.”

Along with the Advance and lighthouse logs, the collection includes copies of the Onaway News, the Onaway Outlook, the Presque Isle County News, the Presque Isle County Democrat, the Cheboygan County Era, the Tower Press and a single edition of the Millersburg Tribune from Sept. 7, 1900, Grulke said. Hard-bound copies of the Advance from 1978 on are available at the library.

With the federal government’s 2014 decision to expand the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary to include waters off Presque Isle County, the papers also could serve as a source for research into the county’s maritime past, Grulke said. He’s already helped one person look up a few visits by a well-known Coast Guard icebreaker.

“A guy from Cheboygan wanted to know when the icebreaker Mackinaw came into Calcite,” he said. “He came in and had four different dates, and sure enough, they even had pictures of the Mackinaw in Calcite harbor.”

Jordan Travis can be reached via email at jtravis@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5688. Follow Jordan on Twitter @jt_alpenanews. Read his blog, A Snowball’s Chance, at www.thealpenanews.com.