Remember that dispute about whether it was Mark Zuckerberg or some other Harvard students who really dreamed up Facebook a few years ago?

Well, it turns out that the notion of putting notes and images on a host’s “face book” was around long, long before Mr. Zuckerberg posted anything on his Wall.

Bryan Benilous, a historical newspaper specialist at the digital-archive company Proquest, said he and his colleagues came across a Boston Daily Globe article from August 24, 1902, titled, “Face Book The New Fad,” describing a party game where revelers sketch out cartoony caricatures for fun.

“I think it is interesting to note the similarities with this first iteration of Face Book as a shared social experience,” said Mr. Benilous. “It’s almost like having friends write on your wall in a much less tech-savvy way.”

There are more than a few similarities between current social-networking practices and early-20th century social practices, said Ellen Gruber Garvey, a professor at New Jersey City University and the author of an upcoming exploration of new media in American history called “Book, Paper, Scissors: Scrapbooks Remake Print Culture.”

Drawing games and versions of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse were popular activities. Ms. Garvey also said it was common for Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries to keep guestbooks in which visitors and friends could scribble thoughts or jokes -– not unlike a MySpace or Facebook profile page. One notable version was kept by Amy Matilda Cassey, an abolitionist from Philadelphia.

“There’s a whole school of amusements that prefaced social networking and those sorts of interactions with friends on the Web,” said Ms. Garvey.

These sorts of albums and scrapbooks were often kept as records of parties, special events and friendships. Ms. Garvey also said it was common for antiquarian newspapers to publish short articles recommending fun activities.

The Face Book article is not the first quirky relic that Mr. Benilous and his colleagues have excavated from old news articles. His team at ProQuest has digitized more than 200 million articles from early editions of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, among others, for archival purposes.

In addition to discovering what appears to be an emoticon in a transcript of a speech by Abraham Lincoln, they’ve uncovered a 1942 Washington Post article titled “Think Before You Twitter” about gossiping and a 1903 article referring to the first “pocket telephone.”

“The digitization process, which has allowed this content to be keyword-searchable, has opened up a treasure trove of content for both serious academic research and for fun,” Mr. Benilous said. “You would be surprised with what you find searching through the database.”