For my direct ancestors, I have made a concerted effort to record as many of their residence addresses as possible. The task would be much too daunting for everyone in my tree, but for the direct ones it is manageable, and for me desirable.

For 1800's documents it is much more difficult to get the actual "mailing address". In rural communities, addresses did not exist. And home delivery didn't start until the mid-1860's and then only for towns with a population greater than 10,000. It was only the movement to more urban and later suburban living that required that addresses be assigned to residences.

One of the reasons I enjoy finding addresses is beyond just documenting ancestors' events and movements. I have a lot of photographs that were taken in the 1930's and later in front of a house - where the house number is displayed. So tracking their addresses helps me date the photo.

It is a fun bit of research and is like a puzzle, so is quite interesting to attempt to find an address for as many years of their lives as possible.

There are many different places where someone's address is recorded. And I am referring to what we now call a residence address, not just the city and county. Here is a list of documents and artifacts that I have used:

1. Census Records - this is the most obvious.
2. City Directories - also obvious (includes telephone directories).
3. Mortuary Records - the decedent's address is included in the document.
4. Obituaries and other newspaper articles - some obituaries contain the residence of the deceased; and other newspaper articles such as marriage license announcements also include the potential bride and groom's address. Other articles - for example the society pages include descriptions of parties and visitors. These often include the address of the hostess/host. And addresses are frequently included in many other articles as well.
5. Death Certificates - the decedent's address as well as that of the informants are generally included.
6. Birth Certificates - the parents address is included and one is not making a rush to judgment that this same address may be the babies first residence as well - at least in most cases.
7. Immigration and Travel Records - post 1900 the address of the traveler is included in travel records and the address of where the immigrant is "going" is included in immigration records.
8. Draft Cards - the draftee's address is included and often when asked for a contact person - that person's address is included.
9. Naturalization Records - the potential citizen's address is specified.
10. Voting Registration and Great Registers - the address of the registered voter is included.
11. Land, deed and property records - After 1860, it is likely that a physical address may be associated with the deed. Later property records include the address.
12. The U.S. Public Records Index is a compilation that includes addresses from Public Records from as early as 1950. Although these provide clues, their accuracy is often questionable, but worth the effort if you have little success elsewhere. I have purposely not included the "People Finder" online sites that one has to pay for to get the "dirty details" about living people.

If you know of others, please indicate so in the comments!

I started researching my family history in 2002. Since then, for online research, i have used hundreds of online sites. Some have been free and some of course have been subscription based.

Sure Ancestry and FamilySearch have been staples; and since I love newspapers, Chronicling America and the many state-based sites have been useful. Also Genealogy Bank and Newspaper Archive. And of course the Ellis Island and Castle Garden sites for immigration stuff.

I could go on and on, but I have one favorite that I always look in on. Now if you don't have any ancestors in this location it will be useless to you, so I hope this "reveal" is not a disappointment - but look at the site anyway - it is a great example of how a mostly volunteer site is put together. Even if the website display is not state-of-the-art gorgeous.

That site is San Francisco Genealogy, or SF genealogy or www.sfgenealogy.com

The amount of information available on the site as well as the indexes to provide places where San Francisco and Bay Area information can be found - is astounding.

Even after a decade I have not been able to check every reference. And since they have a specialized search engine for the site - I don't have to.

They have sponsored and encouraged volunteer indexing - which resulted in several Mortuary indexes, that have been especially helpful in my research. And they have been frequently recognized as a top destination website for genealogy. 

So kudos to Ron Filion and Pamela Storm for creating and maintaining such a wonderful site - my favorite! It's always like "old home week" visiting San Francisco Genealogy.

I have uploaded my family tree data via GECOM to a number of the One World Tree sites - Ancestry, WikiTree and a couple of others. I did that in the hopes that other researchers who might be connected would have access to some of my research and that if they thought they might be related they might contact me so we could have the joys of collaboration.

Cousin Bait? Sure.

But guess what. 

IT STOPS THERE.

No you cannot have my photos and No you cannot have my ancestor's stories One World Tree. Those belong to them and they belong to me and other "certified" members of their families - no one else.

Why is that you ask?

It's simple.

For whatever reasons that these One World Tree sites want their photos and stories, those reasons are not good enough. You see - anyone can duplicate my research - it's "easy" - just start searching all the databases, repositories and collections that I and my family members have. You can surely duplicate my tree. No problem. With up to a decade or so of dedicated research you can come up with their dates and locations, etc. No big deal, if you want that information bad enough for whatever purpose you have.

But their photos and stories? No way. They belong to their families - not the world. They were passed down like the hand crocheted tablecloth that I have that is well over a hundred years old. They are family heirlooms just like the typewriting medal my grandmother won a hundred or so years ago. You want the medal too?

So you say - I don't share?  I think not - I share everything to any one of my family members who want all the data and artifacts that I have collected. No problem. Just ask - if you are related.

One big "dead people" database? Not for me. And especially if that database includes THEIR photos and THEIR stories.

Those stories were lived by them and passed down to me and I recorded some of them via blog posts and articles. And indeed I have uploaded some of their photos online - but not to the One World Tree sites. So you will have to plagiarize the stories and steal the photos if you want them ALL IN ONE PLACE.

It's up to you.

In case you guessed it I am not a strong proponent of the "One World Tree" concept, especially for photos and stories.


What do you think? Please comment below.

Everyone who has searched newspapers online will fail to find something. It happens incredibly often. The stakes are high for genealogy researchers, where finding an article about an ancestor can make a huge difference in filling out a family tree.

I have often heard researchers say "I can't find a single article about my ancestor, even though I have searched for hours!"

Laying competency aside as a factor, the biggest reason is that scanning of one and two hundred year old newspapers, either from paper or from microfilm, produces way less than optimal results.

More importantly, one must know that searching through an index created by humans who have read the source material and then typed the index is far superior to having a machine/software scan and process a dusty old newspaper. Yet the massive size of newspaper collections prevents the creation of the index manually. You must expect inferior results and set your expectations accordingly.

Please take a look at the following list, and hopefully some of these errors and anomalies will provide you with some hints to overcome them and actually find what you are looking for. There are many others - but these are ones that I have personally experienced:

1. Hyphenated words were often used because of fixed width type as well as the experience and capability of the typesetter. Hyphens are less utilized today but were a staple years ago. Take that into consideration if you are searching for a surname or other search criteria with many letters in one word. Try splitting the search into two words where the hyphen may have been normally used.
2. If there is an "h" in your search term, try exchanging a "b", since b's and h's are quite similar and can "confuse" the OCR process. As an example, searching the California Digital Newspaper Collection for one of my surnames - "Braunhart" yields 1,507 results. Replacing the "h" with a "b", hence searching for "Braunbart" yields 96 results - for the SAME person. That is approximately another 6%!
3. For a similar reason as "h" and "b" are confused - the same holds true of "c" and "e".  I have not had as many difficulties with this pair as with "h" and "b".
4. Likewise, lower case m's and n's are often confused. The m's are often converted to several combinations of letters.  Also r's and n's can be confused.
5. I's in lower as well as upper case can often be converted to slashes or exclamation points and the numeral 1. And vice versa.
6. if the original newspaper is "dirty," by that I mean there is excessive ink or the scan is dark - many times spaces will be scanned but not presented as spaces. There are a variety of strange characters that may be picked up.
7. If the newspaper was scanned and then processed directly with OCR, that is one pass. If the newspaper was scanned to microfilm and scanned again and then OCR'd that is two passes. Thus a two pass operation has the potential to have a decreased quality of results. There isn't much that you can do about it - but it is nice to know.
8. This one is not really about scanning, but is more of a cultural challenge. Until the last few decades, women were not referred to by their maiden or given name in newspaper publications. So in my mother's case, after she was married, any newspaper articles cited her as Mrs. Robert J Marks, or Mrs R. J. Marks, not Muriel Marks. So looking for "Muriel Marks" with the exception of her obituary - would have led to zero results.

So don't be discouraged by "lack of results" from doing online newspaper searches. You just need to "outsmart" OCR and try various combinations to get to those elusive ancestors. Be persistent.

An additional help would be more crowdsourcing to correct OCR errors and improve the text. An example is reCaptcha processing that is used for Google Books.

Another crowdsourcing example that I personally have used is that of correction on the actual online newspaper site, such as the aforementioned California Digital Newspaper Collection. In this example, registered users can provide edited text that is then incorporated into future searches. Kind of like a newspaper-related "pay it forward." This capability is provided on that site and many others from the fine folks at Elephind.com, who created the software used by the California collection as well as many other online newspaper sites.


For many more details about scanning, OCR and related subjects please read Scanning FAQ by Project Gutenberg.

Another excellent article is Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs, from the March/April 2009 publication of D-Lib magazine.

Good luck - be persistent and have reasonable expectations.

For many, genealogy and family history research is a solo and solitary endeavor. For me, the first 8 years were pretty much "all by myself."  I got lucky through Social Media to make a fantastic connection that opened up my "Braunhart" branch considerably.

But this article is not about that branch. It is the true story of how I found the siblings for my great great grandfather - Louis Marks.

And how they were found using PRIMARILY newspapers.

And how those old dusty newspapers (actually they were online so not so dusty) found me a NEW cousin!

Yes - all because of newspapers - the subject that I write about ALL the time.

I had found Louis early on, but knew nothing of his siblings, parents etc. As is often the case - Louis was the one who immigrated to America and so his parentage became significantly more difficult to discover. And also was identifying his brothers and sisters.

I began to get some hints and clues that he had a brother Emil. About 5 years ago I had found a newspaper clipping about an Emil Marks, who had been hit by a train and was killed in Oakland, California.

Now I had an inkling that Emil and Louis were brothers. From a naturalization log and their naturalization index cards from 1864, they were suspiciously next to each other in the log, had the same naturalization date and had the same witness at their naturalization "hearing."

And a couple of years later, I found this entry in the 1875 San Francisco City Directory, which discusses a company named "Louis Marks and Bro" and cites both Louis and Emil. Evidence, not proof, but certainly enough for me at that juncture to claim their brotherhood.

So NOW we have brothers Louis and Emil.

A few years later I received an email from Scott Harris, a descendant of Fanny Lust (love that name). He had found a newspaper article that stated that Fanny was suing the railroad company, as she was handling the estate of Emil Marks. Scott had surmised that maybe he and I were related and asked me if I thought that possibly Emil and Fanny were brother and sister. He had heretofore not known anything about Emil or Louis.

So through a bit more research, including California Death Index research, where that index states the name of the deceased's parents as well as the maiden name of the mother - it was discovered that Fanny's maiden name was indeed "Marks" and thus it was likely that Emil and Fanny were brother and sister. Now they could have been cousins as opposed to siblings. Fanny's Death Certificate was ordered and it showed that her maiden name WAS Marks and that her father's name was Isaac Marks.

So Yay! I had what was very likely a NEW COUSIN on the Marks' side! And I didn't have many cousins there to begin with and only one who was interested in Genealogy (my dear cousin Kit Crawford - for the record).

Thanks for hanging in there with this story. We have a lot of clues and what some might call evidence, but nothing really that ties Emil, Louis and Fanny together a little more tightly. Until I found in the past week - an obituary in the newspaper OF COURSE - and it was for Emil - and it was a FANTASTIC find!

Now - this obituary confirms the brotherhood of Emil and Louis - but who are Mrs. S Lust and Mrs. I Schudmack, their sisters?  Well we know from many types of records that have been accumulated - that Fanny was married to Simon Lust, who coincidentally was also killed by a train. And oh, by the way - Emil and Simon were business partners in the 1860s as we later discovered.

So now Scott Harris and I ARE cousins! Yippee! But who is Mrs I Schudmack?

The last few days have been filled with research and discoveries about Mrs I Schudmack - is that Lottie Schudmack, who had 7 children, who was married to Isaac Schudmack - and whose children when they died and were cited in the California Death Index had their Mother's maiden name as "Marks"??? Oh and the Hebrew inscription on her gravestone translates to her father being named As Isaac Marks?

Yes indeed!

By the way - I have reached out to some of Lottie Marks Schudmack's descendants via Social Media. Wish me luck as I hunt for more cousins.

In closing then, I just want to say one thing:

....and welcome to the family Scott! And we are waiting to welcome you - Schudmack descendants!