ROOTS & BRANCHES

Of course, this “Roots & Branches” series comparing genealogy today with the continuing ed course I taught about it in 1991 wouldn’t be complete without talking about newspapers.

Which is more ironic than I care to admit – because I didn’t mention newspapers at all in that course a quarter century ago!

Now having written a whole, commercially published book on the topic, I’m both amused and a bit horrified at my omission.

In my defense, the world of newspaper research was considerably different in 1991. Digitization of the old publications, let along the optical-character recognition software technology to make them word-searchable, were both in the future.

As a result, unless you had a specific date for an event or article or were willing to invest a huge amount of time (often spent “going down the rabbit hole” into other interesting things not directly related to research), newspapers were significantly underutilized.

My first for-pay research jobs were from a couple of researchers who knew I then lived close to the State Library of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg (then and now a major repository for newspapers.

Microfilming remained the standard preservation tool for historical newspapers up to the early 2000s – but while it did indeed save the newspaper information from literally crumbling away, it only made the newspapers marginally more accessible (that coming from those microfilms being available through Inter-Library Loan.

Then in rapid succession, the OCR technology came of age. OCR software creates a second “skin” on top of the digitized newspaper page that is capable of being searched and highlighted word by word.

This searchability brought newspaper research to the fore, enabling researchers to build biographies of ancestors “one sentence at a time” through short mentions in newspapers.

Between free digitized newspaper sites such as Old Fulton Postcards nd Chronicling America – as well as subscription sites such as GenealogyBank.com and Ancestry subsidiary Newspapers.com – thousands of newspaper titles are now available and searchable online.

Of course, there are many more thousands of titles that remain undigitized. For some of these, historical and genealogical society volunteers have compiled indexes of deaths, marriage or other mentions, sometimes in the form of published abstracts and other times as unpublished manuscripts or clipping files in libraries.

So what did my reminiscence over these last nine columns prove, if anything? Well, I can certainly say that despite the additions of some key technologies, a lot of what you do in a genealogical search remains the same.

But, thankfully, those key technologies of the Internet and DNA make a lot of that searching more robust in ways I could have never anticipated in 1991.