USING OLD NEWSPAPERS IN YOUR RESEARCH

Any old newspaper clippings pertaining to your family can be gold mines as well. People usually keep birth notices, marriage announcements, and obituaries stashed away somewhere. Look in family scrapbooks, old wallets, old photo albums and even in old bibles where an article might be used as a bookmark.

But most of the articles about one's family are probably have not been saved. Public libraries offer several resources for digging up these old articles which may contain valuable information about ancestral families.

Online Resources

Most public libraries today subscribe to an online database from Newsbank, which gives the text of newspaper articles going back about twenty years. Newsbank recieves digital text from local newspapers, and makes it available with a search engine to quickly find obituaries, marriage announcements, property transfers, birth announcements and whatever else the newspaper printed. You can search for a particular person or even a particular organization, and come up with articles which mention that person or organization. This is a great way to find obituaries for desceased love ones, or for all the people you knew where affiliated with a particular church, high school, etc.

Microfilmed Newspapers

But Newsbank only goes back a couple decades. To research obituaries and family articles before Newsbank started providing this subscription service to our libraries, it is necessary to consult microfilm copies of the old newspapers. Most city libraries collect microfilmed copies of their home town newspaper, as the original newspapers quickly become yellowed and brittle. Hard copies of newspapers are rarely available longer than a month or two.

To successfully research microfilmed records, the patron must know the approximate or exact date of the event being searched. Microfilm is linear and a lot time can be saved if you know which microfilm to pull out of the drawer. Encourage your patrons to find a good estimate of the date before searching miles of microfilm for one article.

Newspaper Indexes

When available, indexes to newspapers on microfilm are very valuable. These indexes are often typed on 3x5 cards by busy librarians and their staff, and rarely have extra subject cards for easier access. Some libraries are now putting their newspaper indexes online. One example is The Florida Newspaper Index for the St. Petersburg Times and St. Petersburg Independent that I had an opportunity to work on for a few years. It is partially online through the Tampa Bay Library Consortium at Florida Newspaper Index. This database of newspaper articles is web-based and includes subject indexing. The index is based on Dublin Core Metadata standards, and catalogs related elements to ease the search.

Images of Newspaper Pages Online

Some societies and businesses are beginning to post facsimiles of newspaper pages online using Opitcal Character Readers for scanning. One historical society which has put large numbers of newspaper pages online is in Fulton County, New York. This database of information from Western New York is available at Table of Contents

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This website written and designed by:
Sharon Marie Centanne,
Genealogy Research Instructor and Internet Trainer
Please direct any questions to:
Sharon.

This page updated April 11, 2008

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