ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I was a newspaper copy editor, there was always the near instant gratification of a daily product to show what you did that evening.

When I became an author, though I tried to write for the ages—and the “lead time” was, of course, measured in months and years rather than days—I realized that like a commercial for an insurance company “life comes at you fast” and the world is ever changing.

Take my book The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide, which was published little more than two years ago. In that time, digital representations of the old papers have continued to pop up like mushrooms even as the newspapers’ modern-day counterparts are having a rough time surviving.

What hasn’t changed is that unlike many genealogical record groups, getting the maximum out of newspapers requires savvy and planning.

It starts by formulating a specific goal and then using “time and place” – the time frame of your research and the geographic place in which it happened – to determine what overall genealogical resources are best.

Newspaper almost always will be part of your research plan if you know all the things that will appear in newspapers—from business openings and “who visited who columns” that were the 19^th century’s social media to estate sales and other legal notices.

Even when it comes to recordings of death, realize that newspapers can provide more than the standard obituaries. There may also be paid death notices, with more or less information than the obit. A person’s passing may be mentioned by a columnist. An unusual manner of death may have warranted an article.

Then you need to decide whether you want to start with a “quick and dirty” or more methodical search.

In a “quick and dirty” search, you start by examining free collections of digitized historical newspapers, such as Chronicling America, state newspaper project sites, local library sites, and the Old Fulton NY Post Cards.

After this, you’ll want to look at what paid sites—such as Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, NewspaperArchive.com and Accessible Archives—have for your time period and geographic area of interest. 

After you’ve exhausted “quick and dirty”—or want to be more methodical from the start—you can us the US Newspaper Directory (found on Chronicling America) or WorldCat (with more up-to-date listings than the directory) to come up with a definitive list of newspapers to seek out through free, subscription or publishers’ websites.

But digitized newspapers are only the starting point. Many newspapers are not digitized or the OCR that makes them searchable has defects.

Use the US Newspaper Directory or WorldCat to see library holdings of newspapers on microfilm or paper form. You should also esek out published and unpublished abstracts of events and clippings scrapbooks from newspapers; many unpublished abstracts can be found in county historical and genealogical libraries.

Finally, expand the time period to account for “this day in history” articles and enlarge the geographic area to include the birthplace or former residences of the person you’re researching.