For all of us newspaper researchers - trying to find articles online about our ancestors can be a valuable tool for our genealogy and family history research.

But we are all hampered by the quality of the OCR process. This is not always the fault of the OCR software - quality of the original image, either paper or microfilm, coupled with the quality of the scan itself can lead to less than desirable results.

But there is hope. An emerging capability is being added to the online arsenal - and that is text correction by registered online users.

This "crowdsourcing" of fixes to the OCR output can be quite valuable to improving the indexes that are searched by the newspaper research software. I first became aware of this several years ago when I starting using the California Digital Newspaper Collection housed by the University of California, Riverside.  Now when I use it, if I see an obvious error in the OCR output, I correct it - hence "paying it forward" for the next user. This software was created by Veridian Software from New Zealand. It is used by several large collections, as well as many other sites. FYI - Verdian Software is also the creator of Elephind.  Elephind is the site where you can search multiple newspaper collections at once for newspapers from around the world.

There are a growing number of sites now who offer this crowdsourcing text correction feature, and not all are Veridian customers. This portends to help us even more in our newspaper research.  I hope more sites begin to offer this capability.

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After writing this article. I came across an article where the author, Rose Holley, lists the sites that she is aware of that offer this exciting new capability. I won't copy her list so I offer the link: 

Crowdsourcing text correction and transcription of digitised historic newspapers: a list of sites

Her list is from March, 2013.  I suspect that there are others that offer this capability now. Thanks to Rose, a digital library specialist from Australia for all she has done to promote this great addition to our research toolkit. She is a pioneer in using crowdsourcing for libraries and archives.

I don't often comment or write about subscription-based newspaper sites and their updates, but this new collaboration between GenealogyBank and FamilySearch caught my eye.

Genealogy Bank has as part of their database, obituaries starting from 1980 through the current year. They have made this database available through FamilySearch, which was just announced.

There are over 500,000 searchable images.  It can be searched at United States, GenealogyBank Obituaries, 1980-2014.

The data from the obits are available via the FamilySearch search results.  It looks like currently you will still need to have a GenealogyBank subscription to see the images directly from the search result. However the images according to FamilySearch are browsable.

Thank you GenealogyBank and thank you FamilySearch!

When thinking of a title for this article, I harkened back to my youth, when there was a famous British-born Jewish comedian, Henny Youngman. He was a master of "one-liners" and was very funny. He showed up on many TV variety shows.

Probably his most famous line was "Take my wife...........please!" This was where he was trying to suck you into thinking that he was using his wife as an example, hence "Take my wife" (and the unstated "for example").  And then a long pause and the irresistible "Please" where he wanted the listener to take her away.

At any rate, what the heck does this have to do with genealogy and family history research?



Lots and lots.

If you do online research for information and records about your ancestors and other family tree inhabitants, you are always faced with a search box - where you enter in many cases someone's name.

And therein lies the problem. Because people either didn't spell correctly or when indexing didn't enter the information correctly.

So if you are searching, you are always batting:

• Census takers with lousy handwriting
• People who didn't spell their name the same way every time they were asked.  (I have some great grandparents who did this all the time).  I have some ancestors who used so many variations that I still don't know the "proper" spelling of their surname
• Indexers who wrote down a misspelled name in a log or journal
• Indexers for online indexes and other record databases who type the names improperly and the mistake is not caught
• Newspapers that often misspelled surnames
• For newspaper indexes, lousy source quality, or scanning and OCR errors

As an example, one of my family tree surnames is spelled "Braunhart".  I have found it in census records, indexes, and newspapers spelled "Brownhart", "Braunhard", "Braunhar", "Braunhardt", etc.

Now ancestry.com and FamilySearch as two examples, will include as an option, variations on the spelling that you entered in  the search criteria box and present many more "candidate" search results.

However, I do not rely on that. I prefer to INTENTIONALLY misspell these names myself, with a bunch of different variations.  And THAT has been very successful for me - especially with newspaper research. Many ancestor records and newspaper articles have been found as a result of this.

So the moral of this story is:

Be a bad speller... Please!  You will be glad that you did.

Two weeks ago I asked readers to take The Genealogy Newspaper Research Poll.

Below are the results.  Not too many big surprises although some conclusions can be made from these results.  My commentary regarding these conclusions are included along with the results for each of the seven questions.

These results were a VERY big surprise. Over 2/3 were very frequent newspaper researchers, which makes my heart go pitty pat. It looks like we need to get the nine going though who rarely do this kind of research

It looks like there is room for improvement for many, although half boasted about their research prowess. Good for them!

I found this to be one of the more interesting and revealing responses.  Two takeaways - I wonder what the "Others' are; and it appears that Newspaper Archive is not as popular as it once was.

Again a quite interesting response. Newspaper Archive has less who have it as a current subscription while the others have more now than "not currently subscribed to")

I didn't find too many surprises here.

No surprise here, but I think the user interface may play a role in the responses.  But that is just my guess.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that not all researchers have only been online researchers and in the past have had to wash newspaper ink off their fingers after completing their research.

What conclusions can you draw from these responses?  Please let us know in the Comments!

I have written recently about similar themes regarding proper focus in one's genealogy and family history research.  For example 6 Ways for Genealogists to Focus.

But it occurred to me this morning as I was doing some research that it is REALLY easy to fall into what I call the "Date Trap"

Let me provide an example.  I have a person in my tree named Milton P Fried (not his real name).  Milton is the second husband of the sister of my Great Uncle by marriage. No where near a direct descendant.  I don't really have a research plan for Milton because he isn't that closely connected to my direct line of descendants.

But - Milton stands out in my list of birth, marriage and death dates because I do not have a birth or death date, or locations for those events.  So those blanks stare out at me when I browse my genealogy software database.

What do those blanks do?  They SCREAM out at me to get filled in, even though they don't really matter. I am not doing any FAN research (Elizabeth Shown Mills' famous Friends, Associates and Neighbors research) on Milton's wife or even my Great Aunt and Uncle.

But those pesky BLANKS need to be filled in dammit. So I spend time trying to find Milton.

Yes everyone, that is a trap and a time suck spending any time on Milton, or those of his ilk. (Sorry Milton - I am sure you were a nice guy).

I am not saying that one shouldn't find event dates for ancestors or important folks connected to your direct descendants, but just because someone is in your tree doesn't mean that you need to spend any significant time filling in every blank.

I only have a certain amount of research time, as I am sure is the case for you also.

Don't fall into the DATE TRAP!

A genealogist walks into a bar and orders three mugs of beer. She sits at a corner table of the room drinking a sip out of each one. When she finishes them she goes back to the bar and orders three more.

The bartender tells the genealogist, “You know, a mug goes flat after I pour it. It would taste better if you bought them one at a time.”

The genealogist replies, “Well, you see, I have two sisters. They live out of state and when we all left our home, we promised that we'd drink this way to remember when we drank together. So I'm drinking one beer for each of my sisters and one for myself.”

The genealogist becomes a repeat customer and always drinks the same way, always ordering three mugs.

One day she comes in and orders two mugs..When she goes back to the bar for the next round the bartender says, “ I want to offer my condolences for your loss.”

The genealogist looks at him funny and after a few moments she laughs. “Oh, no, they are fine,” she states, “it’s just that my husband and I joined the LDS and I had to quit drinking. It hasn't affected my sisters though.”

As many of you know, if you read the articles on this site frequently or randomly,  I have an extreme interest in newspaper research to help in my family history research.

In my opinion it is one of the top three methods to find information about one's ancestors.

Yet many folks do not take full advantage of this outstanding resource.

So in the interest of determining how you make use of newspaper research, I have decided to offer my readers the opportunity to take the poll below.

The results will be published in a couple of weeks.  Thanks for your participation.

And as always - happy newspaper hunting!

There should be a question about how to improve newspaper research, but I suspect that the top two answers would likely be either 1) More newspapers available online, or 2) Better OCR quality.  If you have any other suggestions, please let us know in the comments.

In any case, I hope your interest in using newspaper research to find articles about your ancestors is increasing.

For more information on how to better make use of newspaper research in your genealogy pursuits, please check out the Newspapers! page on this site.  Hopefully there are some resources as well as information that will help you.

The Library of Congress Chronicling America site is now in excess of 8 million online searchable newspaper pages - available for newspapers that were published between 1836 and 1922.

The National Digital Newspaper Program has two new partners joining the program this year - the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the South Dakota Department of Tourism and State Development, who will digitize newspapers for the states of Nevada and South Dakota. 


For more information see Nevada and South Dakota Join the National Digital Newspaper Program

There are now 39 participants in the program.

Hopefully for all of us newspaper researchers, some day all 50 states and territories and DC will be represented.

Last January, I wrote an article introducing you newspaper research junkies to the UPenn Library Guide.  The article Excellent Historical Newspaper Research Link Resource - UPenn also contains the link to their site.

I just received an email from Nick Okrent, the U.S. History Librarian at the University library.

He has added a new feature to the library guide which is very cool.  It contains filtering by newspaper ethnicity type and state, as well as a timeline and list features. A map is also available that is clickable.  Here is a screenshot

If you are interested in new tools to aid you in your newspaper research for ancestor articles, I highly encourage you to take a look at the new UPenn features:

Historical Newspapers Online, USA

Take a look!

No this article isn't about brick walls - it is about present day BAD HABITS!

Please bear with me as I talk about the "old days." In business when I started over 45 years ago, we communicated via meetings, phone calls and typewritten memos.  It is important to know that in a memo, one discussed in detail possibly 5 or 6 "bullet points" about one entire subject.  If you received a memo that required a response, you answered every single bullet point in your response.

Today we have email, Twitter and texting by phone.  People have become used to short bursts of information and having to deal with only one bullet point or question at a time.

This actually came to light today as I reflected on several people, who when receiving an email from me - invariably only respond to the first paragraph.  So if there are multiple requests they almost always don't read or ignore the rest of the email.

We have developed bad habits because we almost always deal with these short bursts of information or one question at a time. And that is because of the tools that we use currently. That is a trap.

So you ask - what the hell does this have to do with genealogy?

A lot.  Because we have trained ourselves to deal with just one piece of information and because a lot of our research is online - we tend to gather one piece of data about our ancestors and then move on to someone or something else. And of course, we are multi-tasking way too much.

This creates lousy research habits and makes us miss what is the one of the core elements of the Genealogy Proof Standard. That is - a reasonably exhaustive search.  Gathering one record does not make for an exhaustive search.

So this is a warning - do not let today's "tools" change how you research or your mindset.  You must concentrate, read everything in a record, and focus.  That is hard to do when bombarded with emails, tweets and texts. Not to mention that we are losing the ability to deal with details in a reasoned and thorough manner.

Don't let "it takes too much time" foil your research.