Enrich Your Research with Newspapers!

Newspapers are wonderful sources for your genealogy and family history research -- and they are available FREE! You might think that your ancestors would never be found in the newspaper, but if they lived in a small city or town, or even out on a farm -- you will find them, and not just in obituaries. The fire referred to in the above "Card of Thanks" was not reported in the newspaper, but the notice was. And without this little notice we would never have known about the fire suffered by my great-uncle Sidney and his family.

Obituaries can be a goldmine, though, even if you already know the date of death and place of burial. Especially if the surviving children are mentioned, you then know that they are alive at that date, and sometimes their locality and spouse are mentioned as well. Those who are *not* mentioned is sometimes meaningful too. A caution that "facts" reported in an obit are not necessarily true.

Top of 1944 Seattle Daily Times article about Billy

I found a story about my father's cousin (left) which was widely reported in the western Washington newspapers, but I had never heard, perhaps because my father was in the South Pacific fighting in WWII during Billy's ordeal.

He was playing in a neighbor's yard, pretending *he* was at war, and hid in a hole he found under a bush. However, soon he found that he was stuck and couldn't get out. Eventually he could hear people calling for him, but was unable to get his voice to work. He was in the hole for 3 days before a neighbor heard a faint call and followed that sound to the bush and Billy. The photo of him in the news story reminds me so much of Bill when I was a kid.

As this post states: Newspapers were the daily diary of the world. Especially in small towns, newspapers were the Facebook of their day and told the story of the families living in the circulation area. Today, most who see some of the old newspapers for the first time, are amazed at the rich detail in their pages.

But be sure to get the whole story--newspapers borrowed space fillers from each other and freely edited.  One story, in Minneapolis papers where the family lived, told of Nicholas Bodvin who killed his abusive father Peter in self defense. Weeks later a Missouri paper printed that Nicholas had killed a priest, Father Peter Bodvin.  If the Missouri article had been the only one found, the family history would have had a very different, incorrect story.

Newspapers.com ($) is available and widely advertised. Some of us have access to it through our Ancestry.com membership. But they are only one place to find newspapers. 

You might not yet have used Chronicling America, which is provided by the Library of Congress. If you are researching in the US from 1789 to 1963, start here! If you have a rare surname, you might get wonderful hits from the main page search. And you can narrow your search by date range and by state as well.

Did you know that our own King County Library System offers those with a library card ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with coverage: 1851 - 2014. By clicking "Change databases" in the New York Times database I found that Proquest also provides US Newsstream which covers 1980 to present. I think we all use the Genealogy and Biography collection of databases, however the NYT is found instead in History, Law, and Culture. It's worthwhile to click around!

Another database within History, Law, and Culture is Daily Life Through History which is created for teachers. This could spice up your books or articles. Another is History Study Center which includes: articles, primary sources, maps, journals, multimedia, study units and history guides. Finally, in this same collection is the Sanborn Maps (Washington State) 1867-1970. These can be a goldmine of information for your city-dwellers.

I'm sorry to report that we have lost access to NewspaperARCHIVE.com through KCLS for now. It is available by subscription.

If you have a Seattle Public Library card you can get free access to GenealogyBank which otherwise is subscribers-only. I find the coverage of King County to be better than Newspapers.com.

I got my SPL card yesterday, and it took less than ten minutes! Start here, and apply online: https://www.spl.org/using-the-library/get-started/get-started-with-a-library-card. That's five minutes.

Next, drop by any SPL branch and request your card. They will verify your application, let you choose your card (I got the little one that fits on my keychain) and walk out with your new card! That's the other five minutes. :-)

Washington State has a digital newspaper archive here: https://www.sos.wa.gov/library/newspapers_wsl.aspx. You will need to apply for a free e-card to get access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives has links to newspapers all over the world! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#Washington looks pretty exciting, although many of those listed aren't linked. Still, you can always do a web search for the localities where your family lived +“newspaper archive” or “online digital newspapers.”

https://news.google.com/newspapers has LOTS of newspapers!

In https://lisalisson.com/how-to-use-newspaper-society-genealogy/ Lisa Lisson explains how the snippets of information you find in society pages and other gossipy newspaper mentions can aid in your research. 

https://fultonhistory.com/fulton.html has American and Canadian newspapers, and if you have Flash on your computer, you might find what you seek.

Seek and you will find, if you look in the newspapers!

by Valorie Zimmerman