Newspapers. How do you search them? Advice and Help please!

Question

I love newspapers when I can actually put a date with the right newspaper and come up with an article.  They are full of rich information.  But I can rarely put a date and the right newspaper together. When I attempt to search (I have a newspaper.com subscription), I usually come up with nada.

I know people who can find information from newspapers at the drop of a hat. How do you do it? What am I doing wrong?

Please help me conquer this source brickwall so I can add interest and information to my profiles.  Thank you for any and all advice!

Answer 1

Genealogy Bank

Newspapers.com (run by Ancestry.com)

NewspaperArchives

These are the big three which cover most newspapers.  You need to understand what is in their database and how they operate.

You can get a clue to which newspapers you need to look at by checking what is available at the Library of Congress through their Chronicling America database.  You can drill down and see what newspapers existed in your locality of interest at during your time of interest and then check the Big Three's database to see who might have it available.  Otherwise you can see which libraries might hold copies of interest and in what format they have them.

Start here: Chronicling America

Comments

USA Newspapers of course.

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This is a great resource, thank you, Michael.

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There is an art form, this is where name variations, colloquialisms, nick names, the locals name for a place at the time of the event, job names, etc. all help to find the stories you are looking for.

Searching for Mary Smith who worked at the Ice Cream store may only be found by a search for Polly Smyth at the 5 and Dime.  Knowing how the database search functions work will help craft a search plan.

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I think that's my problem.  I don't understand how the database search functions.  I am very good at online searching in general, but newspaper searching seems like a whole other ball game that I don't know the rules to/

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Basically a lot of these databases do not understand variations.  You need to literally guess the exact word useage.  Thus learning about a time and place from the perspective of the people who lived in that time and place can be very useful.

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Try looking for something on their websites that describes the database and how to search it.  Then google it to see what others have found useful.

Here is google search that may help you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+to+search+online+databases&oq=How+to+search+online+databases&aqs=chrome..69i57.5234j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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This for example.

http://genealogybank.com/static/downloads/HowtoSearch_eBook.pdf

and this

https://www.genealogybank.com/newsletter-archives/201211/how-search-or-browse-specific-newspaper

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Wow!  You are a wealth of information :-)  I will take some time and read each of these.  Thanks!

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If you find or learn anything of value, be sure to share it on G2G.  Great question.

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This is my favorite find in a newspaper.

Look for Carpenter Culp's Terrible Tumble

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Wow.  I wish they still wrote like that. I bet most general readers would not be able to understand or appreciate a significant degree of that verbiage.

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Thank you for all of the information Michael.  It boils down to--you need to have a date in mind and a newspaper in hand.  Then search from there. Trying to search like these newspaper repositories work like Google, well, doesn't work.  I am going to keep the link to Chronicling America handy so I can find the newspaper first and go from there.  

Thanks!

Answer 2

I use GenealogyBank & simply type what I want into their search engine. I use state & year as my parameters.

Comments

That is a subscription site too isn't it, Doug?

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Yes, about $70/yr

Answer 3

There are several I have found right here at g2g:

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/309162/free-source-for-u-s-newspapers

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/414083/digitized-canadian-newspapers

http://www.theancestorhunt.com/blog/search-40-million-historic-us-newspaper-pages-for-free#.WXTtV9crLct

The searchable G2G contains a fountain of information.

Comments

These are great resources.

But my main problem isn't finding newspapers, it is searching them when I get there. I seem to have an invisible brick wall that keeps me from figuring out where to find the information other than going page by page hundreds of times over looking for one tiny clue.

Edit:  I seem to do better with Paris newspapers for some reason ;-)

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Something I've had good fortune with is finding the obit of an ancestor or descendant via google.

That enables me to check the vicinity for that surname in the paper it was published in.  With all respect to copyright issues, many times I can paraphrase a synopsis of the findings and then link to that source.

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Yes, I have had more hits to newspaper articles with Google than I do in the actual newspaper databases.

Answer 4

Emma,

For western New York in particular this site has fantastic material,

http://www.fultonhistory.com.  It works best using explorer - not Chrome or Edge,  It takes time to learn to use it but the amount of material for the locations covered is wonderful - and it is FREE.

Searches work best for somewhat unusual names - if Mary Smith married Tom Jones - forget it.  Unless her sister was a bride's maid and her name was really strange.

Comments

As you note, FultonHistory can be quirky to use, but there's some great content there.

It's probably best if you aren't particular about what you find there. If you are focused on finding a wedding, you might never get the desired result, but the search for the wedding might turn up a family obituary or an advertisement for the shop your ancestor owned. On one of my recent visits to FultonHistory (I was probably looking for a wedding), I found a bunch of news articles documenting an ancestor's involvement with the county and state Democratic party and his election to the New York State Assembly. I had no idea about any of that!

Answer 5

I have the same problem with my searches...nothing

Newspapers.com search engine kinda sucks.

I found much more information my already knowing the date of an event, and location (or hometown), and going straight to the full paper and reading the whole paper (which took ma a while to figure out how to do with newspapers.com).

Broke through a huge brick wall recently with my wife's family that way.

Comments

I am glad to hear you say their search engine sucks.  Because I have to agree (run by Ancestry.com sorta says it all).  It gets me nothing.  And their database of newspapers feels small.  I am thinking I am wasting my money with them and wondering if I would do better with Genealogy Bank or Newspaper Archives?

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The best database is the one that has the newspaper you are looking for.  That is why I say to check what their database holds.  I have to search a lot in Tennesee and Ohio.  If the database does not hold the appropriate newspaper from those states, it does me no good to purchase their subscription.   That is why I like the LOC to see what newspapers likely hold my ancestors.

For example, I have a family story about the parents of Smith Alexander Ricker dying in a wagon accident.  I learned that his mother died in Aug 1881.  A search of the LOC turned up Libraries that held newspapers from Greeneville, TN and surrounding areas and I narrowed it down to a handful that existed and then discovered that the likely issue that would hold my Ancestors story has not been digitized.  No one apparently holds the Aug issuse from 1881.   It ain't in anyone's database.

Answer 6

I tend to use FindMyPast's newspaper database which I believe is the same as the britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk but is easier to search. I find that because they use text-recognition software, not everything comes up, so it can be a bit hit & miss whether something comes up or not, and it is a nightmare for common surnames.

I find searching on locations in the keyword field helps, and also narrowing down the search to a smaller range of years. If I'm looking for an obituary, then I narrow down the search to just the the year and county and browse the papers manually and often find entries that don't come up in the index.

I also go back over my surname list every few months and re-search, just in case new batches of newspapers have been added that weren't there previously.

I find it more frustrating when I find an interesting article of someone with the same unusual name, but can't find them in any other documents to identify how they are related!

Answer 7

I'm using Newspapers.com too.  I have had enormous luck with small town newspapers.  Because, well, they are smaller.  So almost all hits on my last name of interest (Yates) were my people.  So I would recommend starting with the people who lived in small towns.  I also made my search very broad, limited only to their last name and the appropriate date.

Now when I moved on to my Yates who lived in a larger city, I had the exact opposite problem - way too many hits on just Yates, and when I added his initials or first name I got no hits.  So I decided to go year by year. I put one year in with just the last name and got about 300 hits.  I went through the whole list.  Many were not "my" Yates, but many *were* my Yates.  For some reason the combination of first and last name was not pulling up things that were actually there.  I wound up going through the entire relevant 15 year period, 1 year at a time, with my very broad name search.  I will say it took me about 8 hours but I wound up with a LOT of stuff that I did not have before on him.

It is probably not the answer you wanted but in brief, the additional parameters DID NOT work for me and I had to hand search everything!  Crazy but it worked.

Comments

This is the same conclusion I have come to.  I wish newspapers were faster to search :-)

Answer 8

I found this article from The Ancestor Hunter blog helpful when learning how to search newspapers which had been digitized and OCR indexed

Comments

Thanks Debi.  Great article :-)

Answer 9

I search newspaper archives every day.  Colorado had one of the very first online newspaper portals, and there are plenty of other states that offer free newspapers on a statewide basis (e.g., California and Indiana to mention a couple).  Colorado was finally eligible to participate in the Library of Congress Chronicling America program, so they are adding a few titles which weren't available online before, including one that makes me quite happy, the Meeker Herald from Meeker, Colorado.  With all database searching, less is more.  Type in just what you really need to know. Most people use phrases in searching, but if a phrase doesn't work, just try a surname.  There are a lot of tricks to searching beyond that, which most librarians could and would help you with.  If you state has a virtual reference service, you might start there.  Some search engines, such as Google, have robust search algorithms; others, like Genealogy Bank, are atrocious.  Keep trying back, because more newspapers are added every day.  By the way, here is Colorado's newspaper portal:  https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/  I'm the top person on the list for edits.

Comments

Thanks J.  That is a heck of a lot of edited words!!! Wow!

Answer 10

People have shared some great resources here ... I’m just answering so I can find this conversation again!

Answer 11

A few months ago newspapers.com had a free period. I went nuts over a long weekend and found a ton of source and biographical material. If another free period is about to happen someone on WT will likely let us know.