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Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

How I process Newspapers.com articles

July 10, 2020 By Janine Adams 18 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of research on Newspapers.com recently. I downloaded a number of articles about my maternal grandparents, Crawford and Susie (Jeffries) Brown, who lived in Spokane, Washington, from 1936 until their deaths in the 1990s. My mother, Betty Sue Brown Adams, was born in Missouri in 1933, but the family to Spokane when she was three and lived there until she left for college.

The Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s daily paper, is part of Newspapers.com Publisher Extra collection. I did a seven-day free trial with them and when it was over I still I had research I wanted to do, so I signed up for a 30-day subscription for $19.99. (I didn’t want to spend $60 for a six-month subscription.) With the clock ticking, I’ve been downloading articles and also working through my backlog of downloaded articles. In doing so much research on Newspapers.com, I’ve developed a method of downloading and processing the articles that I thought I’d share with you here with some screenshots in case it’s helpful.

As always, I’m sharing what works for me…that doesn’t make it the right way or the best way. And it doesn’t mean I won’t change it up later. But this is what I’m doing now. (Several years ago, I did a screencast of how I process newspaper articles from Genealogy Bank, which was slightly different. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.)

When you find an article on Newspapers.com, you have the option to clip the article so that you find it later on Newspapers.com and others can see it (you can also download, share or save on Ancestry.com by clipping an article), or you can print or save the article. Because I don’t plan to keep my Publisher’s Extra subscription and because I prefer to download everything to my hard drive, I choose to the download the article and also to download the entire page it is on, for context. Here’s what I do:

Once I’ve found an article that I want to save (in this example, it’s a 1943 article about my ten-year-old mother performing in a musical program at a PTA meeting), I click on Print/Save.

Then I click on Select portion of page. (Click on any of these images to make them larger.)

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step OneThen I outline the article using Newspaper.com’s grab tool and click Save.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step One

Once I click Save, I’m given an option of saving it as a jpg or a pdf. When you save as a pdf, the source information is included. I always save a clip as a pdf.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Three

Once I click Save as PDF, the article is downloaded to my hard drive. When I open it, it looks like this:

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Four

You can see that Newspapers.com has included the newspaper title, date, and page number of the article, as well as the date it was downloaded and the URL for the image. This is really helpful when I create the source citation in Reunion, the genealogy software I use on my Mac. Notice that I have changed the filename of the article per my file-naming protocol. I always put “clip” in the filename for the clipped articles, since I will also download the entire page using the same filename (minus “clip”). I save the article in my Surnames folder.

Next, I go back to newspapers.com, click on Print/Save again, and this time select Entire Page. Then I’m asked if I want to save it as a jpg or pdf. I always save the whole page, as a jpg. That’s just my personal preference.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step FourOnce I click Save as JPG, the page is downloaded and I change the filename to match the clip’s filename (omitting the word “clip.”)

Now it’s time to glean information from the article and add it to Reunion.

I take a fact from the article, enter it into Reunion and create a source citation. In Reunion, I use the template for Newspapers to create my source citations. So here’s what the source record for this article looks like (again, click any image for a larger view):

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step FiveNote that I have attached both files, the clip and the whole page, as multimedia files in the source citation, by simply dragging them from the Finder. But before I do that, I do one other thing. I click on the little clipboard icon in the Preview pane and I paste the citation into the metadata of the file. Here’s how I do that.

I highlight the two files (article and whole page) in Finder, right (or control) click on them and then select Get Info. That brings up the metadata for those files. I paste the source citation in the Comments field. This is really helpful later on if I want to see which source a particular file is attached to.

Processing an article from Newspapers.com Step Six

Then I drag the files into the source record. After I’ve gleaned all the information from the articles, I file them in my folder structure.

A final note: In this particular example, you might be curious how I entered this tidbit about a musical program in Reunion. Under Residence in the Events tab, I added the date of the newspaper article and Spokane, recording that my mother lived in Spokane on 16 May 1943.Ā  But I took it a little further. This was one of six Spokesman-Review articles I found about my mother performing as a girl. So in the Notes tab I also created a little listing of those performances. Here’s a screenshot:

Processing an article from Newspapers.comI don’t know if it looks complicated laid out like this, but it really isn’t. I pretty easily got into the rhythm of it. The process can get a little tedious, but I think it’s worth the effort to have both the clip and the whole page downloaded. The little nuggets you get from newspaper research can really paint a great picture!

 

Filed Under: Challenges, Genealogy tips, Organizing, Technology Tagged With: Brown, electronic files, genealogy tools, newspaper clippings, newspapers, organizing aids, research, source documentation

MyHeritage offering free photo colorization

April 22, 2020 By Janine Adams 13 Comments

When I was at RootsTech, MyHeritage had a booth where they were colorizing old black-and-white photos for people. The booth was always swamped with people. I wasn’t one of the people who stood in line for this service because the whole idea of colorizing old photos just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on my objection, exactly. But I’m curious what readers of this blog think.

Today, I thought I’d blog about it, so decided to upload a couple of photos to try it out for a spin.

At left (at the top of this post) is a photo of my 2nd great grandparents, Samuel Vorce Wheeler (1852-1937) and Elizabeth Jane (Jennie) Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933), taken in 1926 on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. MyHeritage allows you to see your colorized and original photos side by side in one photo. You can move the dividing line back and forth and watch the photo change. That happens at the MyHeritage website–for the purposes of this post I took a screenshot. The photos you download (like those below) do not have the divider.

Here’s a photo of the Arthur Brown-Rhoda Wheeler family. (Rhoda is the daughter of Samuel and Jennie.) That’s my grandfather, Crawford Brown (1906-1996), on the far left with the dark striped shirt. I think the photo was taken around 1916. The top photo is the original that I uploaded. (I took a photo of the print with my phone, transferred it to my computer, and uploaded it.) Beneath is the colorized version.

I have to admit I find the colorized version more eye-catching. But it doesn’t feel like a 1916 photo, does it?

It’s incredibly simple to upload the photo to the MyHeritage site (just drag and drop). The colorizing takes seconds. There’s no charge. With a click, you can download the colorized version and/or a comparison photo that contains both images.

It’s amazing, but I’m still not sure quite what to think about it. I do know that I’m not going to include the colorized versions among my genealogy documents–they’re purely for fun.

Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

Filed Under: Genealogy tips, Preservation, Reflections, Technology Tagged With: Brown, family photos, genealogy tools, technology

Building genealogy into a vacation

May 5, 2017 By Janine Adams 1 Comment

Building genealogy into a vacationI’m writing this from New York City, where I’ve been since Sunday. I’m having a fabulous time with my college buddies, one of whom has moved to the Upper East Side. Early in the week, I had the pleasure of doing some organizing in her apartment (you can see my post on my organizing blog about the products I used in her kitchen cupboard) while she was at work.

On Wednesday, before my other buddies arrived, I had some time to myself. I purposely didn’t plan anything because I was so confident I’d win the Hamilton ticket lottery. Amazingly, I did not receive $10 tickets for the Wednesday matinee of Hamilton, so I decided to spend a little time focusing on my genealogy.

I thought I’d go to the New York Public Library, which has a great genealogy collection. I took a look at my family tree to see my New York-born ancestors. I looked at the sources I had for them and saw an index I’d found at FamilySearch.org and used WorldCat to see if I could find the book that contained that index in New York. Sure enough, it was available at the NYPL, but it was also available at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, at 77th and Central Park West, quite a bit closer to my Upper East Side digs than the 42nd street main branch of the public library. It was smaller and less overwhelming and therefore more appealing to me.

I learned from the website that the library is open to the public and has some strict security guidelines, in terms of what you can bring in. I also learned that it has an online ordering system that allowed me to research what I was looking for from home (well, from my friend’s apartment) and request it so that the books and manuscript collection were waiting for me when I got there.

It was a stroke of genius on my part to spend the afternoon this way. When I got to the Historical Society, located right next door to the American Museum of Natural History, I was immediately thrilled with the grandeur of the building. And while I wasn’t able to see Hamilton on Broadway, I did see the famous statues of Hamilton and Burr facing off in their duel, which is housed in the building.

Inside the library, my books awaited me and I immediately found some information that made the trip worth my while. Once I was through looking at the books, I moved to the manuscript collection for Coenties Slip, an area in lower Manhattan that was owned by my ancestor, Conraedt Ten Eyck, in the 17th century. (I blogged a little about Conraedt and Coenties Slip when I visited Manhattan with my niece a couple of years ago.)

The manuscript collection was comprised of original, handwritten documents. It contained Conraedt’s handwritten will. Not a facsimile of the will, the real deal. I photographed it through the shiny sheet protectors the pages were encased in, which created a reflection that will make it a little challenging to transcribe, but I’ll be able to do it. (That’s a picture of the first page of the will at the top of this post.)

What a satisfying afternoon. It was a delight to be in the gorgeous surroundings of this library, getting in touch with history and learning about my family. My friends don’t share my interest in genealogy, so I was so happy to be able to snatch this little pocket of time for my research while I was here. (And yes, I did log my research!)

I think I’m going to try to always find a little time for research when I travel, ideally using in-person resources available locally. I’m so glad I was able to build research into this vacation!

Filed Under: Excitement, Genealogy tips, My family Tagged With: Brown, excitement, research, research trip, Ten Eyck, travel

Gravestones can contain errors

July 31, 2015 By Janine Adams 4 Comments

gravestones can be inaccurateI know this isn’t news to most of you, but the fact that gravestones can contain errors was brought home to me after my mother passed away last month. As I posted at the time, her obituary contained an error, even though I (a professional writer) had written it myself.

Somehow I felt that more care was given to the accuracy of gravestones, since they are, literally, engraved in stone. But I learned otherwise when my father and I went to the cemetery office to make arrangements. The office worker handed me a printout of what the grave marker would look like (it’s the covering for the niche in which her cremated remains were placed) and my mother’s birth date was wrong. She was born May 2, 1933 and the marker proof said May 5, 1933.

I caught it handily and made the correction. And of course it was simple human error. But what if I hadn’t been there and my grieving father hadn’t caught it? The gravestone would have been wrong. I wonder how many times that has happened in generations gone by. I would imagine our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of seeing proofs.

The experience has led me to take less stock in the “proof” that I had thought a gravemarker provided. It’s simply another secondary source that needs to be verified through other means.

It’s a great reminder of why it’s important to have multiple sources for any facts we track down.

Filed Under: Genealogy tips, My family, Reflections Tagged With: Adams, Brown, cemetery, record keeping, research, source documentation

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about me

I'm Janine Adams, a professional organizer and a genealogy enthusiast. I love doing family history research, but I find it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed and not know where to turn next. So I'm working hard to stay organized and feel in control as I grow my family tree.

In this blog, I share my discoveries and explorations, along with my organizing challenges (and solutions). I hope by sharing what I learn along the way I'll be able to help you stay focused and have fun while you do your research, too.

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