January 19, 2022
Introduction: In this article – the first in a new series presenting genealogy tips – Gena Philibert-Ortega shows how to better search newspapers. Gena is a genealogist and author of the book “From the Family Kitchen.”
It’s easy to go to a genealogy website’s search engine, enter an ancestor’s name, date, and place, and hit “Search.” But that’s not the best way to search. And most likely, you will miss valuable hits.
Frustrated that you can’t find anything – or very little, when you suspect there is more information there? Let’s take it one step at a time. Over the upcoming weeks, I’m going to write a series of articles helping you have more successful searches, using the GenealogyBank search engine as an example.
Start with Newspapers
First, in this article, let’s take a look at discovering what newspaper content is available for your ancestor’s time and place. This is an important step to take even before you conduct an actual search.
Note: Although known for its huge newspaper collection, GenealogyBank also has a separate obituaries collection as well as records from the U.S. Census, Social Security Death Index, government publications, and historical books. You can choose any of these separate collections (each with its own search engine) from the “Collections” drop-down menu on the homepage. If you want to search all of these collections at once, use the search engine on the homepage. However, in order to avoid getting overwhelmed by too many search results at once, a good approach is to choose the “Newspaper Archives” collection (which includes historical obituaries) and use its search engine for your initial searches, to start finding some of the basic information you need for your family tree such as birth, wedding, anniversary, and death notices.
About GenealogyBank’s Newspapers
GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives have more than 13,000 newspapers published in the United States, from all 50 states, from 1690 to the present day, including ethnic and foreign language newspapers. These include:
- African American
- German American
- Hispanic American
- Irish American
- Italian American
- Jewish American
- Native American
About 95% of the newspapers found on GenealogyBank are unique to our website and cannot be found digitized elsewhere.
Newspaper content on GenealogyBank is either digitized newspapers (complete newspapers) or transcribed obituaries (recent obituaries). Digitized newspapers – the Historical Newspaper Archives – include city, county, regional and national newspapers.
Like the Historical Newspaper Archives, transcribed obituaries – the Recent Obituaries collection – also include local and national titles. When I checked recently (and remember, GenealogyBank adds new papers all the time), there were 183 national titles in the Recent Obituaries collection, such as Ebony and the Christian Science Monitor. To search a list of these titles, click here.
Searching for a Newspaper
Before you search, take a look at what newspapers are available in the area where your ancestor lived. To start, go to the top of GenealogyBank’s homepage and click on “Browse.”
A drop-down menu will appear giving you the option to browse newspaper titles by state, title, date, or recently added content. The option of searching “Recently Added Content” is a good one if you want to keep up with what new titles have been added or new dates added to existing titles since the last time you searched.
For our purposes, let’s take a look at how to search by state. Click on “Newspapers by State.” You will see this page.
From this page you can use the search engine to filter results by entering a state’s name, then a city’s name and/or specific newspaper title. If you just want to choose a state, the easiest way is to simply click on the state from the list of states. Let’s start by clicking on “California,” and we will narrow our search by city later.
Notice that the results list shows me newspapers by:
- City (or the word county)
- Newspaper title
- Years of coverage
- Issues available
- Collection (Obituaries or Newspaper Archives)
In the case of some newspaper titles, you can click on the “Years of Coverage” (when it is blue, indicating a drop-down menu) to see what the various date ranges are for that title. Because the title may have missing issues, you’ll want to click and make sure the dates you need are present.
Note: You can search GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives for your ancestor in a number of ways, including the Basic or Advanced search engine. You can also click on the newspaper title and use the search engine for that title. The choice is up to you. For example, when I clicked on San Francisco Call Bulletin from the list of California newspapers, I was taken to the San Francisco Call Bulletin’s own search engine.
Now, let’s narrow our search and choose a city to add. I’m going to enter San Francisco. For this search I received a list of the 158 San Francisco newspapers available on GenealogyBank.
Keep in mind that your ancestor may have said they lived in San Francisco, but they really lived in a nearby city. It’s not uncommon for people to say they live in a bigger city that people are more familiar with than the name of the small town nobody has heard of. Also, there can be more than one newspaper that is relevant to your search. For example, there might be a county newspaper and a few nearby city newspapers. In the case of my Texas ancestral family, there were no newspapers for their town. However, there are three local newspapers from surrounding cities that mention them. So, not finding the exact town your ancestor lived in doesn’t mean there is no mention of them in other newspapers.
Now Find the Newspapers You Need
Now that you know how to search for newspaper titles in the GenealogyBank collection, search or browse for the titles that can benefit your research. Keep in mind that not finding a specific title may not matter. Your ancestor may have appeared in other local newspapers. Also, newspapers should be searched for our ancestors’ names as well as social history context that can help us better understand their world. Good luck with your searching!
