The Multnomah Co. OR Public Library has a service called Ask Us Online which can be accessed at http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/questions.html. They will even look items up in their newspaper index which references papers back to 1850. If they find your ancestor listed you can get copies of the obituary etc. for a fee. I had someone lookup my gggrandmother's brother in the newspaper index which lead to 2 articles in the Oregon Journal by Fred Lockley - he wrote a series called Impressions of the Journal Man in the 1930's - these 2 articles contained a wealth of information on my family. The Oregon Historical Society, http://www.ohs.org/, has part of their catalog online. They also have a large collection of newspapers and will send photocopies of material at very reasonable prices. I found a handwritten manuscript by my ggggrandmother in their online catalog! Hope this helps someone. Regards, Nicole