In honor of Mother’s Day, Newspapers.com is offering free access to their premium collection through May 9.
I happily pay for a Newspapers.com Publishers Extra subscription because I find so much great information there. But if you’re not a subscriber, I encourage you to give it a whirl for free this weekend. I suggest you check the available newspapers (you can search by state) and make a list of the family members you can search on in various localities before you start.
It’s great to see what kind of news your ancestors may have made. And, of course, finding obituaries can be a treasure trove of information. (Just remember to a grain of salt!)
Personally, I have found lots of little articles about my family members that individually can feel kind of tedious to process but collectively can paint a nice picture. (I find it’s worth the time to download and add the information to my database.) And every now and then I find something more juicy, like an article about my grandfather’s uncle being arrested for assault for beating up a citizen who voted against his father in an election for county judge. (That’s an image of that article from the 4 Nov 1909 edition of the Messenger-Inquirer of Owensboro, Kentucky at the top of this post.)
If you have some time on your hands this weekend, you might enjoy exploring Newspapers.com at no cost. And you might find it helpful to check out my blog post, How I Process Newspaper.com articles.
Before you get started, I encourage you to come up with some research questions. That will help you use you research time well. It’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole with newspaper research!
Thanks for the notice, Janine. And thanks for linking to your steps in processing a clipping. Have you noticed that Newspapers.com also provides a transcript? I ask because I didn’t notice it for the first year that I used Newspapers.com, and then it was only when a faithful friend pointed it out to me. Sometimes it’s pretty poor, but it’s always worth checking for a long-ish article.
After I click “View Clipping,” it takes me to a different screen, showing the clipping and offering (at the top) Edit, Share, Print, and Download. BELOW the clipping, it says “Show article text (OCR).” Clicking on that will cause it to show the text as the computer interpreted it. I drag my mouse over the text to select it, then copy and paste it into the “Free-form text” field of the source citation (in Reunion in my case).
As I mentioned, it usually requires a little doctoring and sometimes a lot. But then I can highlight some sentences with bolding or other colors, so my eyes can scan it more easily for the central facts in the future.
Another point I should mention is that sometimes on Newspapers.com the newspaper name and page number are NOT faithful to what was printed in the page header. Your idea of saving the whole page could save you in these situations. It seems to happen in large cities with a number of surrounding suburban newspapers, maybe owned by the central company. As an example, Newspapers.com might label something like the “St.Petersburg Times” page 4 as “Tampa Tribune” page 137. For some newspapers, it also will call page D-27 page 153. In other newspapers, it handles the section-page correctly. Watch out for those high page numbers.
Marian, I did not know about the transcripts! Thank you so much for telling us and for providing such detailed information! I really appreciate it. I had noticed the page numbering problem on occasion. I appreciate your pointing that out too.
I get a lot of useful data from those long, fluffy descriptions of weddings, like how the members of the wedding party are related to the couple, where they went to school, the jobs they have, where they plan to live after the wedding, and who the attenders from out of town were.
Yes! And I love the descriptor “fluffy.”