ROOTS & BRANCHES

Just a couple of weeks ago “Roots & Branches” shared some musings from relative genealogical newbie Laura Wolf.

She’s been perusing the older columns and as someone with a background in social science research, she has loads of questions that I wish more budding family historians would ask (like how to better engage students and family), but a couple of them brought us back to where the conversation began: historical newspapers.

“Can you lay out the (simplified) steps you would use if you wanted to see what newspapers served a particular community and to see if they have been digitized?” Wolf asked.

I would broaden Wolf’s comment a bit because I’m a big believer that genealogists shouldn’t settle for just the low-hanging fruit of digitized newspapers but instead should concentrate on all potential newspapers from an area.

And the best way to perform that search is through the “US Newspaper Directory” on the Chronicling America website at the URL, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/

To use the directory, you’ll need to fill in a state name and can drill down by choosing a county and even a city name, although I recommend not using the city name feature because it might narrow the search too much.

A search of this directory reveals 70 titles just for Blair County alone, which may seem daunting, but when you inspect these titles, you find that many were published for only a few years and/or have few or no issues extant (you can determine the latter fact by looking at the title’s “holdings” listing in the directory).

You can also truncate the results by selecting a more narrow time frame, but that needs to be done carefully, too, since a later newspaper might have a “100 years ago today” type of column that could be relevant.

Once you’ve determined your total newspaper “hit list,” then the real spade work begins. You should start with free sites such as Chronicling America and Old Fulton Post Cards, then look to see what subscription sites such as Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and MyHeritage.com have to offer.

Finally, it’s worth a look at library systems local to the newspapers in question since they might have independently digitized a community’s newspaper.

Wolf followed her initial question with: “What advice can do you have for someone who finds that a key newspaper of interest has not been digitized who wants to support/encourage/help that to happen?”

As previously mentioned, many local libraries get digitization grants, so bringing such a newspaper to their attention is a great way to accomplish this.

A great example of collaborative work was the fund-raising effort spearheaded by the Centre County Genealogical Society to digitize the Democratic Watchman of Bellefonte in their county, some 20 years of which are now on the free website, Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive, at the URL, https://panewsarchive.psu.edu/