To research historical newspapers and be successful, it helps to be educated about the characteristics of these important history and genealogy resources; where to find them, and how to best search for the articles that you are seeking. 

These lessons are from my own historical newspaper research experience, which encompasses several years of both online as well as offline research. Online newspaper research is not just a matter of entering a surname or a word in a search box.  By understanding and applying these lessons, you can achieve a much better chance of finding the extremely helpful and interesting articles that exist about history and our ancestors.



The lessons below will go a long way to improving your research skills:

• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 1 - Where To Find
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 2 - Search Basics
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 3 - Browsing
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 4 - Search Index and OCR
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 5 - Boolean Searches
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 6 - How to Change Your Searches to Get Better Results
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 7 - Don't Search Just Surnames
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 8 - Use Hyphenated Search
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 9 - Use Abbreviations
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 10 - Newspapers at the Library
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 11 - Use Special Keywords in Searches​
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 12 - Choosing a Site to Search
• ​Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 13 - Search Tips and What to Avoid

By reading and applying these relatively short articles I GUARANTEE you will locate many more pertinent historical; newspaper articles!

This is next in a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 13 is a conglomeration of search tips and mistakes to avoid while searching and analyzing your results.

When researching old newspapers, there are many things that you need to know and many mistakes that can be made when drawing conclusions about the articles you find, or downloading images, etc. 

​Here are some tricks and tips as well as what to avoid:

• Always write down the title of the newspaper, the date of publication and the page number where you found the article - when you find the article. You don't want to have to do another search in the future to find out where you found it.

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• Sometimes the final resting place is not accurate in the obituary. Maybe the family changed their minds or maybe the cemetery closed and all the graves were moved to another cemetery.

• 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.

• Divorces Filed and Interlocutory Decrees are not Divorces. Only Divorces Granted count.

• 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.

• 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.

• I would not limit your search for newspaper titles to just the city of residence. Span out a bit and include the newspaper for the county seat. There is likely to be different types of information published in the newspapers for that likely larger populated area.

• If your target lived near the state border, check out neighboring state newspapers. For example, if they lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, check out the Omaha, Nebraska papers. Or if they lived in Camden, New Jersey, try the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania newspapers. 

• Unique human interest articles were copied all over the country and world. One of my ancestors was given Geronimo's knife in the 1880's in California and the article was published in papers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana and London, England as a human interest story. So take that into consideration.

• Don't just search for articles for the dates that the ancestor was alive. Often, newspapers had a column that featured stories from 10 years ago, 25 years ago, etc. and your ancestor might be mentioned in that column. Furthermore, if your ancestor was well known in the community, he or she might be referred to in an article a few years after his death. This is tricky if your ancestor has a common name and date ranges are important to narrowing the number of search results.

• When searching for obituaries, include a couple of weeks after the death of the ancestor. Many times the obituary publication was delayed, but more importantly, some obituaries were changed after their original publication because of errors, modifications, or additions. So don't just stop searching after you have found the first one.

• Regarding obituaries, don't just limit your search to the location of the ancestors death. Many times the obituary is copied (and possibly altered) in newspapers in the area where your ancestor had lived previously.

This is next in a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 12 is all about finding and selecting online collections of newspapers that you can access, browse and search.

There are three types of online sites – free, subscription, and library/archive.  The first two are self explanatory.  The third requires that you have a library card at a library that has subscriptions available that they have paid for. Some offer remote access and others require that you physically be at the library or archive.


Free Online Sites

Once you have determined the type of site – how do you decide if the site might bear fruit for you?  Here are some criteria to use:

Select a site that has a collection for where your target search occurred. Then do your search. There are hundreds of county, state and province based collections that may provide with you with newspapers that are not in the big collections. If you don't know which newspapers are available for your desired location, you can always use this Library of Congress database for American newspapers. It also shows where offline newspapers might be located in archives, libraries and other institutions.

Check the dates of the newspapers that are available in their collection.  Don't bother searching if the location is right but the dates don't fit and vice versa.

There are specialty collections as well. For example African-American newspapers, Jewish newspapers, student newspapers, union newspapers, and even farming newspapers.

How to Choose a Subscription Site 

There are a few subscription historic newspaper sites, such as Newspapers.com, Newspaper Archive, Genealogy Bank and British News Archive.  How do you choose which ones to subscribe to?  A lot of articles can be found in free collections, but their content is different than what is available from the pay sites.  Here are a few criteria to consider:

Collections Available - just as in Real Estate where the motto is "Location, location, location" - the motto for subscription newspaper research sites is "Database, database, database." I get asked all the time if someone should purchase a subscription to site A.  I always ask them first - for the states, cities or areas that they are researching, as well as the dates that they are researching, does the site have a collection of newspapers available?  All sites have a list of what newspapers and dates are in their collections.  Check those out before you buy.

Price and Billing Practices - some of the aforementioned sites are 4 times as expensive as others. Some have a monthly plan, some only bill annually. Some auto-renew and some do not. If you purchase a subscription it is incumbent on you to read the terms of the subscription as well as the fine print. As always with any purchase online - it is buyer-be AWARE.

Scan and OCR Quality - the index that the site has created is only as good as the quality of the original scan and the OCR software that they use to build the index. Were the newspapers scanned from originals or from microfilm, or from copies of microfilm? Some of the collections that I have seen have an extremely poor quality image displayed after selecting a search result.  This indicates to me that the original image that they applied the OCR process to was degraded and hence the index certainly will suffer.  In other words - your ancestor is mentioned but the scan was so lousy that the OCR process could not build an acceptable index entry with the correct spelling of the name.

User Interface and Searching Features – sites have different user interfaces - some are simple and easy to use; some have richer capabilities and features. I always like to try the "Advanced Search" features because that generally indicates the total breadth of capability. And one must read the Help documentation for each of these sites. Generally they will explain which type of search criteria can be entered, for example Boolean and proximity searches. Quite honestly I have heard many subscribers complain about not finding anything when they haven't even tried to learn all the search capabilities available to them.

Subscription collections can be a gold mine and if you are strapped financially, many of them have a short term free trial or other methods to access their collections inexpensively.

Library Sites

This topic has already been covered in Lesson 10 - Newspapers at the Library.  I suggest that you refer to this lesson for much detail.

Chronicling America, through its new labs.loc.gov capability, is adding crowdsourcing of historic newspaper cartoons and photographs, which will allow users to provide captions for these images.

From the announcement of this new feature, entitled "Beyond Words":

"The Library of Congress today launched labs.loc.gov, a new online space that will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources designed to encourage creative use of the Library’s digital collections. To help demonstrate the exciting discoveries that are possible, the new site will also feature a gallery of projects from data challenge winners and innovators-in-residence and blog posts and video presentations from leaders in the field.
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“We already know the Library of Congress is the ultimate treasure chest, but with labs.loc.gov we are inviting explorers to help crack open digital discoveries and share the collections in new and innovative ways,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Whether you’re tagging images from our digitized historic newspapers to help future visitors, or exploring the changing nature of democracy through the 25 million bibliographic records the Library recently made public, we are providing tools and inspiration that will lead to new uses and new ways of looking at the incredible materials here at the Library.”

One of the first features on labs.loc.gov is Beyond Words, a website that invites the public to identify cartoons and photographs in historic newspapers and provide captions that will turn images into searchable data. This fun crowdsourcing program grows the data set of text available for researchers who use visualization, text analysis and other digital humanities methodologies to discover new knowledge from Chronicling America—the Library’s large collection of historic American newspapers. Beyond Words is available as a pilot project to help the Library of Congress learn more about what subsets of Library data researchers are interested in and to grow the Library’s capacity for crowdsourcing."

To read the entire article click on Library Launches labs.loc.gov

This is exciting news that will enable users through crowdsourcing to add captions that when added to the search index, will enable an added search experience of Chronicling America.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 11 is all about searching old, historic newspapers using specialized keywords in your search criteria to help get better results.

When entering our search criteria in the search box on an online historical newspaper site, we often focus primarily on the name of the target ancestor or family.  We might also search for a location or an address. or combine these with a name.


My guess is that well over 95% of online newspaper searches employ the above techniques.

I offer you some additional ways to hone in on target ancestor articles, and this is to use keywords in your search criteria. Here are some examples, that if used will get you more and better results:

• If you are searching for obituaries, add the keyword "beloved" or "beloved son" or "beloved wife" etc. The word beloved is used frequently in obituaries. So entering these keywords plus the surname may focus in on obituaries.
• Similar to "beloved" try the word "dear", as in "dear husband" or "dear sister." This will also focus in on obituaries.
• A third keyword used in obituaries is "loving".  For example, "loving daughter" or  "loving husband".
• If you are searching for a birth announcement, add in the keywords "born to the wife of"  or "born to" along with the name and that will focus in on articles about births.
• Was your ancestor a business owner?  Add the word "president" or "proprietor" to the name.
• How about lodges and clubs? Try "president" or "chairman" or "secretary" for example.
• Try using the occupation in your search criteria, such as "electrician" or "plumber" in conjunction with the name.

There are likely many more examples. Try adding keywords - you will be glad you did.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 10 is all about searching old, historic newspapers at the library! (When I say "library" I include archives and educational institutions).

Many history and genealogy researchers who are used to searching for articles about their ancestors, other people, and historical events in historic newspapers have gotten spoiled with the increased number of online collections that are available for free. And many have invested a few dollars (and other currency) in subscriptions to online sites and collections.

But did you know that there are other quite large collections that are available via your local library or a library that may require a little bit more drive time?

One example of such a service is Readex. They have a few thousand titles that are searchable, depending on the subscription that your library has invested in.  I won't comment positively or negatively on their capability or functionality. Just try Readex and other library based sites to expand your research.  (Disclosure:  I do not have any affiliation with Readex/NewsBank - I am using them as an example of library-based services)

Here are some examples of what they might have available with a link to find out the exact titles that are in each collection:

• Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922

• American Ethnic Newspapers

• American Newspaper Archives 

• 20th Century American Newspapers

• Caribbean Newspapers

• World Newspaper Archive

Now, these are online collections that are available only at the library.  And there are others - from Gale, Accessible Archives, Paper of Record, just to name a few.

And guess what - libraries do have microfilmed newspapers and original newsprint.  Since about 20% of all old newspapers have been digitized (author's estimate), do not forget to use these two sources as well.

So, get out of your PJ's and get in your car and go to your library or other institution that have these types of resources available - AND if you have a library card you might just be able to login and search from home!!!

Do not forget to browse microfilm and original newsprint as well.  Does it take more time?  Indeed it does. But these two sources may be the only ones that have an article of importance to you.

Newspapers are being digitized at an increasing rate, so search the free sites online, invest in a subscription as well, but for sure - do not forget the old standby - your library.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 9 is all about searching old, historic newspapers and capitalizing by using abbreviations in your search criteria.

In old newspapers, abbreviations were used to save space. Abbreviations were used to shorten many words - the most notable being given names as well as addresses.

Remember that your search criteria is just a series of letters that are matched against a search index that was created from the scan and OCR process applied to the subject newspaper page.

Your search index database is not smart enough, for example, to interpret "ave." for the word "avenue."  So if you are entering "335 14th Avenue" - if the search index includes "Ave" the search will not be successful. Therefore you must search both "335 14th Avenue" and "335 14th Ave" to get all ;possible results.

Here are some examples of abbreviations that you should employ in your search criteria:

1. For street names, try "ave" and "avenue" Also "st" and "street". There is a great number of others that you should consider for the "type" of "street.
2. For cities, if there is an abbreviation - for example NYC for New York City, or Philly for Philadelphia, try the abbreviation as well as the whole city name.
3. How about business names - "co" and "company", "inc" and "incorporated", etc.
4. Given names can provide a great number of increased results by using abbreviations.  Try abbreviations for names, such as "Wm" for William, or "Jno" for John, or "Jos" for Joseph, "Eliz" for Elizabeth, and "Robt" for Robert, just to name a few. Here is a terrific list from Genealogy In Time.
5. One often forgotten is "Mrs." Remember that married women were not always addressed with their first name in a newspaper article, but were written as Mrs. Robert Smith for example, regardless if their name was Mildred, Margaret, or Mary.  So incorporate that into your search criteria.
6. This one is a bit unique.  But if you are searching classified ads, you can always search for a phone number. We certainly don't know the phone numbers from many 20th century ancestors, but if you happen to find it in a telephone directory, you might find classified ads in newspapers by searching that phone number. When I was a kid, our number was Elgin 1-1696, so I would search for "Elgin" as well as "El" before the numbers.
7. For military titles, try "Capt" for Captain, Col" for "Colonel", Sgt" for Sergeant, etc.

There may be many others, so you need to search for abbreviated words as well as entire words to maximize your search results.  My guess is that you can likely increase your pertinent results by 10 to 20%.

The University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries has just announced that they have received a grant from the Commission for the Las Vegas Centennial to fund digitization projects.










From the UNLV Library:

"The first grant, for $49,400, will fund the digitization of the Las Vegas Age, which ran from 1905-1947, and the region’s first newspaper, the Las Vegas Times, which ran from 1905-1906. The grant will be used to create an online, searchable versions of the two newspapers through the University Libraries website.

These newspapers are of great historical value for the City of Las Vegas and give a glimpse of what was happening during the early years of Las Vegas,” said Michelle Light, director of Special Collections and Archives. “By adding these historical newspapers to our online collections, we will be able to make them available to researchers around the world and preserve key documents chronicling the history of our community,” Light said."


​To read the entire article, click on: UNLV Libraries Receive Two Grants

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Terrific News from the State of Nevada!

For access to historic newspapers from the state that are currently available for free online, please check out​​Nevada Online Historical Newspapers Summary. 

The State of Arizona has just announced that they have received funding that will enable the state to add 100,000 historical newspaper pages to their collection in Chronicling America.  





From the state:

"We are honored and extremely excited to continue the Digital Newspaper Project,” said Secretary Reagan.  “The addition of these papers to the online collections will nurture a fuller appreciation for and understanding of the diverse forces which have combined to create our unique Arizona identity.

The new grant will digitize another 100,000 pages which will make the total online newspaper collection almost 500,000 pages.

UA hopes to digitize some non-English newspapers including one of the longest-running Spanish-language Mexican American newspapers in Arizona, El Tucsonense (1915-1922)."

For the complete article, please click on UA given grant to continue digitizing newspapers

Terrific News from the State of Arizona!


For access to historic newspapers from the state that are currently available for free online, please check out​​
Arizona Online Historical Newspapers Summary.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 8 is all about searching old, historic newspapers and capitalizing by searching hyphenated words properly.

Finding articles in newspapers is in my opinion - an art, not a science. One must be clever and resourceful to get around the limitations in old newspapers, whether they be poor original quality, copies of copies as sources for scanning, as well as the limitations of the OCR process.

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Another "feature" of older newspapers is the use of the hyphen. 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 heavily used years ago. 

The bottom line is that if you search for a portion of your ancestor's surname (if it is multi-syllabic), rather than the entire word, you may get additional results. For example, if your ancestors name was "Jorgenson" try searching for "Jorgen." The typesetter may have split the word so that at the end of one line are the letters "Jorgen-" with the hyphen, and the next line may start with "son".

I have an ancestral line with the surname "Braunhart".  Many times an article may have a line that ends with "Braun-" and the next line starts with "hart".  This creates some additional challenges, just like "Williamson" may be split up as "William" and "son".  The first set of letters ends up being a very common set of letters so your results may be too numerous to be of much help.

Here are a few examples that show the different uses of the hyphen. And always consider that the "break" may not always be in the logical place in the word.

• You could search for "Patter" when your target name was "Patterson"
• Even a short word like "Hardie" is split up in this example, so you would search for "Har".  This may lead to too many results but is worth a try.
• Be open minded about where the split may occur.  In the case of McDonald I wouldn't think that the name would be split with "McDon" and "ald", but searching for odd splits may lead to many more results.

Don't give up and let hyphens give you additional opportunities and additional searches.  You will indeed find more articles this way. Be creative! Don't be bogged down by 21st century logic. The split may be different than you would think it should be.

In February, 2017, I published a list of the catalog of online historical newspapers from over 400 different collections put together by the Advantage Preservation Company, developed in conjunction with the libraries, historical societies and museums across the U.S. who preserve the historical newspapers for their communities. To see the entire updated list, click on Search 45 Million Historic U.S. Newspaper Pages from Advantage Preservation for Free!  It totals over 45 million pages from 37 states from the U.S.


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As of early August, 2017, another 500 thousand pages were added - Advantage Preservation Adds 500 Thousand Historical Newspaper Pages - July, 2017


Here are the new County and Library collections that were added after the previous Advantage Preservation update, followed by the collections that have had additional newspapers added to their collections in the last month. 


​New County and Library Collections (listed by county; number of issues or pages)

Connecticut
New Haven County
Ansonia Historical Commission

• Evening Sentinel - 13,195 Pages
• Ansonia Evening Sentinel - 6,936 Pages

Iowa
O'Brien County
O'Brien County Archives

• O Brien County Bell - 76,380 Pages
• O Brien Pioneer - 654 Pages
• O Brien County Democrat - 360 Pages
• Courier - 126 Pages
• Primghar Times = 120 Pages
• Paullina Times - 35 Pages
• Oakland Acorn - 10 Pages

Louisiana
Caldwell Parish
Caldwell Parish Library

• Caldwell Watchman - 1,525 Pages
• Caldwell Watchman Progress - 567 Pages
• Caldwell Watchman And The Caldwell Progress - 203 Pages
• Caldwell Watchman And Progress - 146 Pages

Massachusetts
Norfolk County
Sharon Public Library

• Sharon Advocate - 7,702 Pages
• Sharon Item - 176 Pages

Nebraska​
Cheyenne County
Sidney Public Library

• Sidney Telegraph - 130,547 Pages
• Sidney Sun Telegraph - 44,056 Pages
• Telegraph - 26,943 Pages
• Sidney Daily Sun - 7,313 Pages
• Telegraph News - 4,437 Pages
• Sidney News - 2,088 Pages
• Peoples Poniard - 1,197 Pages
• Cheyenne County Record - 693 Pages
• Plaindealer Telegraph - 671 Pages
• Sidney Republican - 160 Pages
• Sidney Telegraph And The Peoples Poniard - 116 Pages

Texas
Karnes County
Karnes City Archives

• Countywide - 8,967 Pages
• Karnes Countywide - 8,675 Pages
• Karnes Citation - 8,063 Pages
• Karnes County Times - 268 Pages

Wisconsin
Forest County
Crandon Public Library

• Forest Republican - 13,343 Pages
• Forest Echo - 3,240 Pages
• Northern Citizen - 2,277 Pages
• Forest Leaves - 2,021 Pages
• North Crandon Reporter - 148 Pages
• Forest County Chief - 24 Pages
• Forest County Spy - 10 Pages

Updated Collections
​Here is a list by state and county of the existing online collections that have pages added in the last month that are available to search for free:

Alaska

• Wrangell-Petersburg - Petersburg Public Library

Connecticut

• Litchfield - Beardsley & Memorial Library
• New Haven - Wallingford City Directories

Illinois

• Brown - Brown County Public Library
• Cook - Bellwood Public Library

Iowa

• Appanoose - Centerville Iowegian
• Clayton - Monona Public Library
• Linn - Cedar Rapids Public Library

Maine

• Lincoln - Skidompha Public Library

Maryland

• Worcester - Worcester County Library

Massachusetts

• Hampden - Wilbraham Public Library
• Middlessex - Tewksbury Public Library

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Montana

• Yellowstone - Billings Public Library

New Hampshire

• Hillsborough - Peterborough Public  Library

New York

• Nassau - Hewlett Woodmere Public Library

Rhode Island

• Washington - North Kingstown Library

South Dakota

• Union - Beresford Public Library

Texas

• Hood - Hood County Public Library
• Trinity - Blanche K. Werner Library 

Vermont

• Lamoille - Stowe Free Library

West Virginia

• Ohio - Ohio County Public Library

Wisconsin

• Juneau - Elroy Public Library

If you wish to see a complete list of links to historical newspapers that are searchable for free from companies like Advantage Preservation and many others, check out Newspaper Research Links.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 7 is all about searching old, historic newspapers without just entering a surname in the search box.

One of the traps that those who search genealogy and family history can fall into - is always searching for surnames.


Obviously this is logical, but it can be a trap. Because, especially for newspapers - there is a lot of other information in articles that are helpful in finding one of your ancestors.

It may be poor quality original newsprint, an unsatisfactory scanning or OCR process, or even misspellings by journalists and typesetters. But surnames are often not exactly the right spelling in the search index. Furthermore, the addition of non-surname criteria can help focus in in the right ancestor's articles.

How about some examples that may lead to better results?

• Search for an address - if you know the address of an ancestor, search for it.  A lot of times newspapers would include the residence of someone - so that may be a good place to try.
• Search for a business name - if your ancestor owned a small business, you might be able to retrieve interesting articles by searching for that name.
• Search for a lodge or club - if your ancestor belonged to or was an officer in a club or lodge or other group - search for that name.
• Search for an occupation - if your ancestor had a unique occupation, try searching for that.
• Search for the name of a sports team or school - often your ancestor may show up in a box score or in a list of graduates.
• Search for the name of a military unit - if they were in the military, often the complete unit name is included in an article.
• Search for a hobby or avocation - did Aunt Mary win ribbons at the state fair?  Or did Uncle Joe collect coins?

In all of these cases it is recommended that you limit the search to a specific newspaper or town/city. I suspect that if you performed a nationwide search for "123 Elm Street" or "gasfitter" you might get too many results to pore over.

So if searching for surnames (again especially with a difficult to spell name or with several alternative spellings) doesn't get you the results that you desire - try some of the alternatives listed above.  And you can always search for a surname AND some of these options if the site that you are using has Boolean search capability. Combining search terms is an outstanding way to hone in on the desired ancestor.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 6 is all about overcoming the deficiencies in the scanning and creation of the search index for old, historic newspapers.

If you do newspaper research online as part of your your genealogy or history pursuits, then you have certainly been puzzled by some of the search results (or lack thereof) that you have received.
​

Creation of newspaper images and application of the OCR process does not always result in what you might expect. You might want to refer to Lesson 4 - Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 4 - Search Index and OCR as well as below:

There is a simple explanation for these issues, and it all has to do with quality:

• Quality of the original material - was the newspaper old and brittle when scanned?  Was it yellowed?  Did it have dirt on it or lots of ink spots?
• Was the scan performed to create the digital image and the index from the original paper, or from a microfilm of the paper, or worse a copy of the microfilm?  Every additional copy or scan degrades the resulting image and when the OCR process is applied the index suffers.
• Quality of the OCR software.- some are better than others
• Quality of the writing in the original newspaper.  Did the author get your person's name spelled correctly?
• Quality of the typesetter - did the typesetter get every word from the author set up correctly?

Thus what you are searching is not a perfect digital index that represents what was originally written by the author and newspaper publisher.

What can we do about it?  There are lots of things to try and this article deals with changing the letters in your search criteria.  For example - if the name you are searching for is "Wilson" and the letter "n" is often picked up as the letter "m" why not search for "Wilsom"?

I guarantee that changing your search criteria will lead to an improvement of at least 5 to 10% in search results. I heard from one reader that changing word pairs got them a 20% improvement.

So what word pairs are often confused?:

• rn and m  (ar n and em)
• h and b
• Capital D and O
• i, l, 1, /, !, and I are all often interchanged
• 0 and O
• c and e
• r and n
• [, ] and l (el)
• nl and m  (en el and em)
• Capital R and B
• n and ri  (en and ar eye)
• v and y 
• Capital S and 8
• Capital S and 5
• Capital Z and 2
• Capital G and 6
• Capital B and 8
• Capital K and |<

My suggestion?  Change your search criteria and exchange the letter string you are looking for to include these alternative letter and letter pairs and see what happens.  You might be pleasantly surprised!

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 5 is all about using Boolean searches to find online newspaper articles. This lesson will discuss the basics of using these types of searches and why you should use them.

Boolean searching was developed by George Boole, an English mathematician.


Boolean searches provide the ability to combine words and phrases using the operators AND, OR, NOT to refine your search.

For example, let's say you have a person that you are looking for that has a common name such as "John Smith." You know that a simple search nation-wide or state-wide would provide too many results for you to ponder. But what if he lived in a smaller town, such as Saugatuck, Michigan. A good search criteria would be "John Smith" AND Saugatuck. This would narrow the search results to articles that contain the phrase "John Smith" and those articles that contain the word "Saugatuck".  See how this would help you?

How about trying a "NOT" example?  Lets say you were looking for someone named "John Dulles".  If you did a search for John Dulles you would likely get a preponderance of results for John Foster Dulles, who was President Eisenhower's Secretary of State. So to find "your" John Dulles you would enter "John Dulles" NOT Foster.

The use of the operator "OR"  operates similarly, except OR would provide results with pages with any of the words that you specify.  You can also combine multiple operators in one search.

Depending on the online collection's software, you can sometimes actually write the AND, OR or NOT in the search box: Others use a little bit different approach, as the two examples below utilize.

In the above example from Chronicling America, the term "with any of the words" operates the same as a Boolean "OR". The term "with all of the words" operates the same as a Boolean "AND".  In this advanced search example, there is no ability in their terminology to perform a Boolean "NOT".

rIn the above example from the Arizona online newspaper collection's Advanced Search feature, you have the ability to perform all three of the operators, again using a bit different terminology.  And the cool thing is that you can combine one, two, or three of the operators in the same search.

Phrase searching is an offshoot of the Boolean AND. Our research criteria of "John Smith" in double quotes, is an example of searching for a phrase.  It operates similarly to John AND Smith.  HOWEVER - a phrase search implies that the words John and Smith are right next to each other in the text, while John AND Smith do not necessarily have to be next to each other on the page. There is a difference.

So make use of Boolean searches in developing your search criteria. Whether you use AND or NOT to refine, or OR to provide more possibilities, these operators along with searching for phrases in double quotes will definitely improve the results that you get by leaps and bounds over just entering a name in a search box.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 4 is all about the creation of the search index for online collections via the scan and OCR processes. This lesson will discuss the basics of OCR and its VAST IMPORTANCE in creating the results from your online searches.

To get from newsprint to an index that you can search online for newspaper articles requires a number of steps and processes that require scanning and the application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

Laying competency aside as a factor, the biggest reason that articles are not found is that scanning of one and two hundred year old newspapers, either from paper or from microfilm, produces way less than optimal results.

Old newspapers are often in terrible shape, with folds, creases, ink blots, old and different fonts, etc. Even though it is easier and cheaper to scan from microfilm, the microfilm had to have been created from a scan of original newsprint at some point.

Simply, the way it works is that a scanner scans an original newsprint page or a page from microfilm.  The OCR software process determines what the letters are and creates an index from those letters to the place on the page where the letters come from.  Some of the time those letters make up a legitimate word in the language, or a name or place, and sometimes the letters are gobbledygook.  This is all dependent on the quality of the original materials and the capabilities of the scanner and the OCR software. Unfortunately in the case of newspapers, there is an abundance of gobbledygook.

Generally, scanning books can yield upwards of 99% accuracy from the OCR process.  You should expect far less percentages with newspapers, as these articles explain.

As a result of primarily the quality of old newspapers, you must expect less than optimal  results and set your expectations accordingly.

That does not mean that you cannot find articles - all is not lost.  Take a look at the following articles on how to overcome some of these limitations and improve your ability to find "stuff."
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• 8 Ways to Overcome OCR Errors when Searching Newspapers 
• The ONE Absolute BEST Way to Find More Ancestor Articles in Historic Newspapers Online

There also will be future lessons in this series that will provide you with further tricks to find ancestor articles.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 3 is all about browsing for online newspaper articles. This lesson will discuss the basics of browsing and why you should use it as well as searching. 

In the "old" days, all you could do is browse through newspapers, either by flipping through original newsprint one page at a time or by scanning through microfilm copies, also one page at a time. And you can still  (and should) do that, since only a small percentage of historical newspapers have been digitized.


Some online sites are browse only and some allow you to browse and search as well.

Browse is sometimes a VERY effective way to find articles that the OCR process did not pick up correctly.  What that means is that the index created by the OCR process does not match the intended letters from the original scanned copy, so browsing may be your ONLY way to find an article. This is very important to know. More on this a little later in this article.

Here are a couple of examples of some online sites that provide a browsing option:

In this example from Alberta, Canada, you select a date or a city and you will be presented with a list of newspapers. You select the date and newspaper name and you will be presented with the scanned images for each edition - whereby you can scroll through each image to find articles of interest.

In this example from Chronicling America, I selected California newspapers and it presented me with the results.  I can opt to browse specific ones by clicking on the calendar icon in the "Browse Issues" column. I will be presented with a calendar for me to select the edition/date of interest and browse through the pages.

Many online collections have a browse as well as search feature.  As stated previously, because the index may not reflect the original letters and words in the source newspaper, you may not be able to find articles of interest just by searching.

You can "smart browse" however. What I mean by this is that many newspapers tended to have the same sections on the same page number from daily edition to daily edition.

For example, obituaries may have generally been on Page 16. So if you know the death date, you can look at Page 16 in the newspaper for the death date and the same page for a week or two after the death date. I have found many obituaries this way, when the OCR created index did not pick up the name correctly.

Other examples:

• Birth and marriage licenses - generally found in the vitals section - usually on the same page from edition to edition
• Local human interest news about residents in the area
• Engagements and marriage announcements often found in the Society or Women's sections
• Legal notices, real estate transactions, etc.
• and many more

The moral is that because the same sections tended to be on the same page number - if you have an idea of the date of the event ahead of time, you can browse from edition to edition using that event date as a starting point. You would be amazed at what you can find if you Browse rather than always relying on searching and the search index.

Browsing is definitely worth it and may be your only option.  Do not discount this important feature, whether online or offline. Make it part of your research repertoire.  You will be glad you did.

This is part of a a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 2 is all about searching for online newspaper articles. This lesson will discuss the basics of searching. About a dozen future lessons will focus on specific techniques to make your searching experience even better and more successful.



Almost all online historic newspaper collections have one thing in common - they have a basic search capability and an advanced search feature. I tell everyone who will listen - almost always use the advanced feature since it provides so many different ways to hone in on the articles that you seek.

Basic Search

Basic searches lure you into entering a surname or full name and hoping for the best, but that's OK.  Let's look at a few online collections and their basic search capability:

This state site for Arizona just allows you to enter one text search term

This state site for Oklahoma just allows you to enter one text search term

Chronicling America allows a search term, a date range and to select a state.

Don't get me wrong - these basic searches are not bad. But if you wish to narrow down your search results, you should try Advanced Search (examples below).  And many sites do not have an advanced search feature so you will have just the basic search, which is far better than nothing, of course.

Advanced Search

Advanced Searches have a variety of added ways to narrow your search results.  Take a look at the same sites' Advanced Search capabilities:

Look at these added features - date range, Boolean operations, exact phrases, as well as selected collections, language and type

Features include Boolean operations and date range

Advanced features include selecting location and newspaper, date range; specific pages as well as language, booleans, exact phrases and proximity searching.

Here is a list of some features from several sites that offer Advanced Searches:

• Select exact newspaper
• Specify newspaper
• Date ranges
• Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT)
• Language
• Sub-collection
• Ethnicity
• Proximity
• Fuzzy and phonic searching
• Related words and synonyms

The moral of this story is to use the Advanced Search feature if available.  This is especially true if your target person has a common name. A simple message for sure, but if heeded will provide you with more successful search results.

This is the first in a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 1 is all about finding newspapers that you can access, browse and search, both online and offline.

Remember that all newspapers have NOT been digitized and thus are not available online - either for free or via a paid subscription.  It is my guess that only somewhere between 20% and 25% of old newspapers have been digitized in the United States for example - and I suspect that the same percentages are in that range or less for most countries in the world.

So where are all these newspapers?

Let's start with the United States. The best way to find out where all the newspapers are located is to use the Library of Congress U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present search feature. The search feature allows you to search by state, county, city, title, dates, keywords. language and several other options. Once you find a newspaper, you will be presented with an image that looks like this:

The left column has all kinds of useful information about the newspaper itself.  If the newspaper that you select has a right column as in the above image, then it is available in the Chronicling America database for free online searching.

If it does not, then it is not available via Chronicling America.  It will be available offline in archives, libraries and other institutions.  And it may be available in other online databases, but this directory does not show you where, for other online collections and databases.

But to find where it is located offline, just click on the "View Complete Holdings Information" link near the bottom of the information in the left column. You will be presented with an image that looks like this:

Listed will be all the libraries, archives and other institutions that hold the newspaper.  It will also tell you whether the copy is in microfilm, newsprint or other medium. Now you know where to find the newspaper of choice. You can visit the library or archive, or make other arrangements by contacting the institution. That is up to you, as well as the institution's policies.

But what about if you wish to search for free online? If the paper is available on Chronicling America, then you can search there.  But despite the size of that collection, there are other collections at hundreds of other sites, far outnumbering the size of the Chronicling America collection. I would suggest reviewing the lists of links that are available from the Newspaper Research Links on this website! These lists are updated two or three times a year.  At the time of this posting, there were links to over 20,000 publication titles.

Your local library might have subscriptions to other old newspaper online collections from NewsBank, Gale, ProQuest, etc. I would check with your library to see what is available.  You might even be able to search these library subscription collections from home if you have a library card. This allows you another large set of free resources to search.

And there are paid subscription collections available for online searching - from Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, and British Newspaper Archive, as well as NewspaperArchive.com just to name a few that focus primarily on the U.S. and U.K.  There are others in other countries as well.

So, now you know where to find these newspapers.  Go for it!

The State of Georgia has just announced that they have received funding that will enable the state to add 100,000 historical newspaper pages to their collection in Chronicling America.  From the state:

"Within two years, the Digital Library of Georgia will digitize 100,000 more pages of Georgia historic newspapers, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).




The DLG will receive $255,590 of the $39.3 million in grants being given for 245 humanities projects across the country. The newspapers selected for digitization will have been published prior to 1963 and will be part of the state's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program. The NDNP supports the creation of a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1690 and 1963, from all states and U.S. territories. An advisory committee consisting of journalists, historians, librarians and archivists will guide the selection of Georgia titles to be scanned.

Historic newspapers are, by far, the Digital Library's most popular resources, according to Sheila McAlister, director of the Digital Library of Georgia. To date, the DLG has digitized over 900,000 pages of historic newspapers."

For the complete article, please click on Digital Library of Georgia receives grant to digitize state's newspapers.

Terrific News from the State of Georgia!


For access to other historic newspapers from the state that are currently available for free online, please check out​​ Georgia Online Historical Newspapers Summary.