These three newspapers were sequentially published by Rufus B. Merchant. The VIRGINIA STAR began publication in 1869. On March 12, 1884 the name was changed to FREDERICKSBURG STAR. The Fredericksburg Star was last published in December of 1893. Here is the letterhead from the Fredericskburg Star Printing Company in 1890. On June 28, 1893 Merchant began to publish a daily, the DAILY STAR. This newspaper continued until it was combined with THE FREE LANCE in September of 1926.
Since these are sequential newspapers of the same publisher, no titles of the newspapers are included in the index, except for 1893, when both the Fredericksburg Star and the Daily Star were published. Check the date to know which newspaper title to retrieve. For 1893 check the right column to find when it was a Fredericksburg Star (FS) issue, or a Daily Star (DS) issue.
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 1877, the earliest microfilm issues available to Robert Hodge. Each entry consists of essentially four parts: Name, Reason for being, Publication date, and Page/Column numbers. The electronic version was created by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College by scanning a copy of the 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. download
