The Free Lance Star began on 1 September 1926 published by the Free Lance Newspaper and Job Printing Company, Josiah P. Rowe Jr., managing editor. The Free Lance Star merged a morning and an evening newspaper, The Free Lance and the Fredericksburg Daily Star, into a daily newspaper. The two newspapers had been under common management of A. P. Rowe since 1892 and the change to a single paper came quickly after his death in July of 1925. The Free Lance Star continues publication today.
The index was prepared by Robert Hodge. The newspaper issues were scanned for items deemed of value to the LOCAL historian and genealogist. Each entry consists of essentially four parts: Name, Reason for being, Publication date, and Page/Column numbers. Names included in lists (schools, fair awards, socials) were not indexed, 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' activities. Robert Hodge stopped indexing The Free Lance Star with the issue of 17 August 1928. The electronic version of the index was created by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College by scanning a copy of the index text and then modifying the format to fit a table.
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.
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