From Part of the fun in researching genealogy is looking to find old newspaper articles about the ancestors they are learning about. Over the world news publications both past and present are being published online That translates to data being much more accessible to family historians—if they know where and how to find them. While there are many pay sites that will offer you the ability to find these records, many exist for a free newspaper search if you know where to look. The essence of Lisa Louise Cooke’s presentation “Tech Tools that Catapult the Newspaper Research Process” which she shared at the National Genealogy Society 2014 Family History Conference in Richmond, Virginia, on May 8th, was that newspaper articles are a huge source of information. Cooke explained that historical newspapers great resources for family history information. By doing the right research, a vast wealt of information, such as deaths, marriages, and other family events can be loacated. Even photographs, such as the one I found of my 3rd Great Uncle doing a FREE search can lead to detailed information about the past family members, now long gone. These old articles can give us a glimpse of what it was like to live back then. Cooke showed off an old newspaper photo she discovered online of her mother as a young girl. In finding the picture she saw a glimpse of their life as they were dressed up like characters from Laugh-In. “To find the right newspaper for your research,” noted Cooke, “look for papers in the geographic community where your ancestors were known to live.” And to search those published during the time frame they lived there. Cooke demonstrated 6 helpful online tools for finding and searching historic newspapers online. Stanford University’s Rural Newspaper Initiative plots 140,000 historic newspapers published over 300 years in the U.S. The data comes from the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” project. You will want to try out the cool slide rule feature that lets you quickly navigate to the year period of interest to your search. Newspapermap.com is another very nifty interactive tool that lets you hover over a geographic area to quickly see the historic newspapers from that location—and it also includes international publications with Google Translate integrated into the site so you can translate the international papers into your native language. Chronicling America is the Library of Congress’ Historic Newspaper site. It covers published papers from 1836 to 1922. The online directory provides additional information on countless other American newspapers dating back to 1690. World Catalog is another free service that provides links to online historic newspapers. You’ll need to register to use it, but an account is free and provides full access to all features. Narrow your search to “newspapers” in the left hand column to focus your search on newspapers only, and you can even insert a zip code to hone in on newspapers from your ancestors’ hometown area. Elephind.com is an international newspaper search engine that culls through 120 million articles from 1,500 newspapers. The number of new newspapers added keeps growing so you will want to check back regularly. The Google News Archive, although Google is no longer actively scanning newspapers, can hold some good possible finds for researchers. If you would like to learn more about Lisa Cooke, you can check her out online. She is the host of The Genealogy Gems Podcast, at www.Genealogygems.com.
Free Newspaper Resources
Free Newspaper Search sites
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Free Newspaper Search sites
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
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