The Library of Congress - Chronicling America website has added hundreds of thousands of new pages - just announced today. As you can see from the announcement, Maryland and North Carolina are highlighted.

This is from an email from the Library of Congress that I just received:




__________________________________________________________________________
NEWSPAPERS ADDED: Hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages added

This week the Library of Congress began adding more historic newspapers to the Chronicling America Web site. First-time contributions from Maryland and North Carolina, as well as many other newspapers, are being added to the 6.7 million pages already available from 32 states and the District of Columbia. 

To learn more about what newspapers have been added or updated recently, subscribe to the Recent Additions RSS feed available from anywhere in Chronicling America. Click on the Subscribe link next to the orange icon (below the Search bar and to the right) and select the 2nd RSS feed listed.

Chronicling America is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.... Read more about it!
_____________________________________________________________________________

For more information or to search the updated collection - 

Links:

Chronicling America Search

List of Digitized Newspapers

Our friends at Elephind, who provide a universal online searching web service for many newspapers worldwide, have updated their list of titles.

For those of you who are not aware of this resource, this is from their website - "The goal of Elephind.com is to make it possible to search all the world’s online historic newspapers from one place. We aren't there yet, but we are adding more newspapers every day."

Personally, I have used it and found it to be quite useful. You might want to visit their site and check out the About page. Expansion of the titles available are certainly always welcome, from any and all online historical newspaper sites.

Here is a summary list of the sources that Elephind makes available. I would encourage clicking the List of Titles to expand and see each and every newspaper held by each source and available for searching.

Australia
Trove [National Library of Australia]  

Mexico
The Portal to Texas History  

New Zealand
Papers Past [National Library of New Zealand]  
Upper Hutt City Library  

Singapore
Singapore National Library Board  

United States
Boston College  
Brooklyn Public Library  
California Digital Newspaper Collection [UC Riverside]  
Cambridge Public Library, Massachusetts  
Chronicling America [US Library of Congress]  
Door County Library  
Kent State University  
Library of Virginia  
Pennsylvania State University  
University of Richmond  
The Portal to Texas History  
University of California, San Francisco  
University of Illinois  
University of Missouri School of Journalism [Missouri Digital Heritage]  

Good luck and happy hunting to all of you who like me love searching old newspapers (and those of you who will grow to love it).

When searching for our an ancestor, we find that a lot of the records specify a county and not the town, village, or city. Often we can come up with zilch regarding a record - not because it doesn't exist, but because the county boundaries have changed.

There are quite a few maps and resources that are available to help, but here are three references that can certainly get you on your way to success:

• Here is a nice article from Amy Johnson Crow of ancestry.com that can get you started. Why You Need to Learn About Changing County Boundaries. Check out the "Red Book" that she references and follow the instructions for information on each county.
  

• Another fun resource is from mapofus.org. As an example, follow the link for Alabama and scroll down to "Interactive Map of Alabama Formation". You can scroll through the map year by year or click on a specific year and see what changes to county boundaries have occurred visually. You can select a different state from the left sidebar.
  

• Yet another useful tool is The Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Try this also.
  

I am sure that there are others, but these are three tools that I have used in the past.

Please add any resources that you have found helpful in the comments.

Happy boundary hunting!

Yesterday I published an article about searching for your ancestors in yearbooks -  14 Resources to Search Yearbooks for Your Ancestors.

As i was researching for that article I found many other types of "yearbooks" unrelated to schools, such as associations, clubs and others.

But one special class of "yearbook" is definitely worth researching if you have an ancestor or relative that was in the U.S. Navy or possibly Marines. And that is Cruise Books, which are basically a yearbook type of publication, generally created after a long deployment. The Library of the Navy Department has the largest collection of 8,000 books or so. I would definitely take a look at their online list of Cruise Books.

Please note that there are also other military branches who have published yearbooks, not just the Navy.

So without further adieu, here are 9 places, some free and some not where you can search for your ancestors in these specialized yearbooks - "Cruise Books". Please note that some are indexed and some not, so for those that are not, you will need to know the name of the ship and year of deployment.

• Fold3 - subscription
  
• Ancestry.com - subscription - over 3,000 books
• Great Naval Images - cruise books available on CD
  
• US Navy Cruise Books - about 800 - Free
• E-Yearbook - subscription
• eBay and Amazon - for sale
• Mocavo - a small collection
• My Heritage - subscription

There are also a number of collectors who make their books available for sale. There are too many to mention here, but if you wanted to go beyond research and actually own one of these books, you can easily find the dealers.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Did your ancestor work for the Postal Service? Do you know which Post Office served the area where they lived?

The Post Office was a bit of a community center, especially in rural areas and also historically elsewhere.

We used to know the names of the person who delivered the mail. Unfortunately that is no longer the case in most circumstances.

But there is hope if you had an ancestor who worked for the Post Office, either as an employee or a contractor. Check out these links. There are tons of resources available but these listed below are certainly a great place to start.

Some are available online and some only by microfilm - but sometimes interlibrary loan is available.

• United States - Post Office Records from the National Archives
  
• Great Britain - British Postal Service Appointment Books, 1737-1969 - available via subscription to ancestry.com
• Great Britain - Postal Museum -  Family History Research Page 
• United States - Kansas Historical Society
• Scotland - Scottish Post Office Directories
• United States - State of Washington Postal Employees
• United States - US Postal Service - People - Various lists such as African-American and Women Postmasters and other Postal Employees
• United States - Postmasters and Post Offices from Texas
• United States - U.S., Appointments of U. S. Postmasters, 1832-1971 - available via subscription to ancestry.com
• World - FamilySearch has over 400 entries (some are records; most are books; some are online; most are on microfilm) related to "Postal History".  Also over 1,300 entries for "Post Office"
• Canada - Canada Post Offices and Postmasters
• United States - Sources of Historical Information - on Post Offices, Postal Employees, Mail Routes, and Mail Contractors - a U.S. Postal Service publication (pdf)

And if you are interested in history, names of post offices, or postal employees from a specific county or parish, you might want to use your favorite search engine to find out if there are resources specifically for that location.

• It's Friday and I am burned out on this week of genealogy challenges. So let's have a change of pace and check out some interesting and funny stuff about our favorite pastime. Check out some of these links for a brief respite from searching for your ancestors in your PJs:
  

• Have you ever heard of any of these family relationship words? My favorite is "machetonim" - a useful term it seems but having "machete" as the root word is curious when it comes to in-law relationships. (I know Yiddish and Spanish are not the same language.) Here's the link: 11 Little-Known Words for Specific Family Members. (Thanks to Mental Floss for this!). And check out the comments for some others.

• From The Genealogue - a wonderful flowchart entitled A Beginner's Guide to Internet Genealogy. I especially like the suggestion to ply your relatives with liquor. Maybe that is what I'm missing.

• From Joe Beine, 25 Things That Make Genealogy Fun. My favorite? "The record that you need is always at the end of the microfilm roll.'

• From the Genealogy Bank Blog, some strange sounding names AND the newspaper articles to support them: Genealogy Humor: Unusual & Funny Names of People. My favorite is "Preserved Fish."

• And finally from My Heritage Genealogy Humor. My favorite is not funny but is what drives me - "You only live as long as you are remembered," the Russian Proverb. I have too many ancestors/relatives who had no descendants themselves - so they scream for remembrance and I volunteered!

The Ancestor Hunt is now on Facebook! If Facebook is your chosen way to access posts and articles, go ahead and Like my Page. I would sincerely appreciate it:

The Ancestor Hunt Facebook Page


And there are lots of other ways that these posts and articles can be accessed. You choose. I post on all of these platforms.

• Twitter - Follow Marksology
• Tumblr - Follow Marksology (I Find Dead People)
• Google+ - Circle Kenneth R Marks​
• Pinterest - The Ancestor Hunt Board - There are several other genealogy-related boards that may be of interest
• Linked In - Kenneth R Marks
• FlipBoard - Boost Your Genealogy with Newspapers
• YouTube - Subscribe to my Channel - The Ancestor Hunt
• Facebook (my Personal Page) - Kenneth R Marks

And of course you can always subscribe to this site so that you can receive articles in your email - just click on the Enter Email Address button under Subscribe for Email Updates.

Thank you for visiting and reading. I appreciate you taking the time to read my postings whether you are a first-time or long term reader and visitor. This site has been a blast to write and knowing that maybe there might be a few things that folks have learned makes it all worthwhile.

I have been doing old newspaper research for a long time, and it is not difficult. It just takes persistence and a bit of creativity to be successful. And experience and some knowledge helps too.

Here is a way for you to achieve more success - one letter of the alphabet at a time!

• A is for Always write down the title of the newspaper, the volume number and date of publication and the page number where you found the article - WHEN you find the article. Otherwise, like a number of early obituaries that I have accumulated, that information I didn't record and now I don't know what newspaper they came from.
• B is for Burial Information which is generally found in an obituary in the newspaper. BUT be careful - sometimes the final resting place is not accurate in the obituary. Maybe the family changed their minds; maybe the cemetery closed and all the graves were moved to another cemetery after the first one closed.
• C is for Crowdsourcing - if the online site you are using gives you the opportunity to correct scanning and OCR errors - please do so if you find an error (and there are many!) Pay it forward.
• D is for Divorces -  Divorces Filed and Interlocutory Decrees are NOT Divorces. Only Divorces Granted count.
• E is for Exchange a "b for an "h", and a "c" for an "e" when doing crafting your search criteria. Often the OCR process when dealing with old fuzzy newsprint or poorly scanned microfilms can mix up these two letters.
• F is for Fulton New York Post Cards - a free site created and maintained by ONE man, a volunteer who has amassed an Online Newspaper Database that is currently 3 times the size of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection. My hero!
• G is for Get Ready to have a thick skin when you find that your Great Great Uncle was a murderer, a rum runner or a pimp!
• H is for Heaton's Index to Digitised British and Irish Newspapers Online
• I is for Is the online newspaper database based on fuzzy searching? It is important to know as you get more proficient since the type of search may or may not dictate HOW you search. You might want to refer to this article - When is Fuzzy Search Too Fuzzy? Elephind Tells Us!
• J is for Jump to specific pages in the same newspaper title. For example, if obituaries are usually published on Page 15 and you know a person's death date, jump to page 15 for that date and the few days following. Often the index may not produce the result that you want so intelligent browsing will produce results.
• K is for Keep an open mind. Search every single section of a newspaper. You would be surprised what you can find if you are open to your ancestor appearing in any and every section of the paper. What about classified ads? Might tell you the name of a business that they owned. How about ads for jobs but not Help Wanted - Help Offered. In old papers, people would put an ad for jobs that they were seeking. This will tell you what skills that they had. Even those ads for miracle elixirs and cures might have your ancestor in it - sometimes with a photo.  My great grandfather appeared in an ad hawking a miracle stomache ailment cure.
• L is for Legal Notices and Land Applications and Land Sales. Check out the Legal section of the newspaper for these, divorce, bankruptcy and business sales.
• M is for Marriage - issuance of a license is NOT a marriage. Maybe the wedding didn't take place or wasn't recorded. But the "Marriage Licenses Issued" section in the Vital Statistics part of the paper is not proof that a wedding occurred.
• N is for Names of women in older newspapers. Most of the time if they were married they were not referred to by their given name but as Mrs. Robert Smith - their husband's name.
• O is for Obituaries, in my opinion the "holy grail" of newspaper research. There is so much information that can guide your other research that can be found in an obituary. See 30 Reasons Why Searching for Obituaries is Like Finding Gold
• P is for Politics - in older newspapers, precinct captains and precinct workers were named; several of my own ancestors participated in helping people vote. A good way to discover other activities of your family tree inhabitants.

• Q is for Quit thinking that all newspapers have been digitized, and for those that have been, indexed as well. Find your nearest genealogy or university library and discover what they have in their collection. Poring over newsprint without an index is tedious but if you know someone's date of death and are looking for an obituary, these manual searches may be your only option.
• R is for Read - read the Newspapers! section of this website to find out a lot more about researching historic newspapers.
• S is for Subscribe. Yes there are a lot of free newspaper online sites and going to a library unless it is far away is free. But there are subscription sites like Genealogy Bank and Newspapers.com and others. And you don't have to subscribe all the time. Get a few month subscription if you can, do a bunch of research and then maybe pick up the subscription again in a year or two. That is unless you have thousands in your tree and want to get newspaper articles about all of them.
• T is for Tedious, because searching online or offline through newspapers is tedious work. Make sure that you do this research when you are well fed and well rested, because you need to be at the top of your game so your searches are the best they can be. You don't want to search the same thing over and over again because you were not in tiptop shape mentally.
• U is for University of Pennsylvania's List of Online Newspapers available in America.
• V is for Verify that the birth location is not based on a term often used in obituaries - "native of."  Just because it states that a person is a native of Berlin, Germany does not mean that they were born there. They could have been born 200 kilometers away and moved to Berlin when they were three months old and spent the next 40 years there; hence someone uses the term "native of," not knowing any better.
• W is for Wikipedia's List of Online Newspaper Archives
• X is for Xtra - extra thought must go into saving the articles that you find online. Is the image large enough? Is it readable later? Are there options with the online site to download the image in different formats? Think ahead so you don't have to do the search again at a later date.
• Y is for YouTube - check out my YouTube Channel where there are over 50 video tutorials about searching newspapers for articles about your ancestors.
• Z is for Zebra - black and white - just like newspapers.

So there you have it. There are a lot more hints but get these down and you will become an expert before you know it.

Well sports fans I wrote a post yesterday about how to Find the Newspapers Available in Google News Archive. The good news is that they are still there but the bad news is that for newspapers published prior to 1970 you can't search them. 

Yes you can still browse old newspapers for now but you can't search Google's index. Since Google doesn't announce much about changes I was unaware of this particular change. After some research it looks like this occurred in early December, 2013. 

So to sum up you can search for newspapers published after 1970 but can only browse for papers older than that. I would encourage you to read this page from Google Help to see the details on how to search the more recent newspapers if you are interested. The Help page is a bit confusing in my opinion. Furthermore, I have noticed that some pre-1970 newspapers have sneaked in to the results, but they are inconsistent and the numbers of hits are not even close to the number of hits before this change by Google. For example a search that I performed prior to December on one of my ancestor's surnames yielded over 800 results; doing the same search today using the techniques referenced in the Help section yielded only 2. I choose to treat this as an anomaly personally and not something that should be counted upon.

So my friends it appears that the Google Newspaper Archive for historical newspapers is DEAD at least for searching (for now). As I said you can still browse, so all is not lost.  And the first comment in this Google Product Forum provides a glimmer of hope.


Yes this has been a wonderful free resource that many of us genealogists have used and thank you Google for that - but this is a bummer.


(Thanks to Missing Merchants from Google+ for raising this issue)

Many people have used the Free Google News Archive to search historic newspapers for articles about their ancestors. If you haven't, you should. It is free and fairly easy to use.

I for one, always seem to forget how to access the list of all the newspapers contained in the archives.

Here is the link and a snippet image of what the list looks like. In case you forget too!

Google News Archive List of Newspapers

The list does provide publication dates as well as the number of issues for each entry in the archives. But there is no way to search the list other than an alphabetical listing. So for example, if I was interested in a list of all African-American newspapers in the collection, there is no way to search for that. So the list is better than having no list at all, but its searchability is limited.