Using Newspaper Birthday Announcements for Genealogy Research

Genealogists spend years getting to know their sources. We learn the ins and outs of archives and their collections of genealogical records, looking to get the maximum amount of information on our ancestors. In combing through the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper archives I noticed that they ran a regular feature called the “Birthday Bulletin,” starting... (Read More)

Tell us your success story.

We hear from GenealogyBank researchers all the time about their success in finding their family in historical newspapers and documents. Do you have an interesting story to tell?Would you be willing to be interviewed about it?If so, please contact me directly at: TKemp@NewsBank.com We want to hear from you. Here is what others have... (Read More)

Top Ten Reasons to get GenealogyBank

Top Ten Reasons to get GenealogyBank: 10. Content you won’t find anywhere else 9. 4 times as many Newspapers as Ancestry 8. Military Records: All Wars – Colonial to Today 7. US Army, Navy, Air Force Registers 6. No clutter – just records you will use & rely on 5. Revolutionary War Soldier Burial... (Read More)

Passenger Lists

GenealogyBank is growing – it now has nearly 300 million items. This morning I found this passenger list – published as a souvenir handbill that was likely given to the passengers on the steamship Silesia when it left on Tuesday November 30, 1869 bound for Plymouth, Cherbourg, London and Hamburg. In addition to the... (Read More)

Passenger Lists to America

Newspapers routinely published the list of passengers on board ships bound to and from America. Here are just a few examples of the thousands of passenger lists published in newspapers that can be found in GenealogyBank. Newspapers published not just lists of immigrants coming to America but also regularly published passenger lists of American’s... (Read More)

Patty Barthell Myers, 1930-2008

Patty Barthell Myers died 9 October 2008, at the home of her daughter, Lucy Bonnington. Her obituary (San Antonio Express-News (TX) – October 13, 2008; Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 Oct 2008) simply stated her “life’s work was genealogy.” Well said. She was the author of numerous compiled genealogies and reference works including: Female index to... (Read More)

A soldier’s last letter ….

“What have I done I asked myself, to deserve to be remembered by strangers in a town in which I had never been…”   You can almost hear him ask that now, over 100 years later as we remember him.   Corporal Wilson Mcpherson Osbon (1877-1899) wrote the letter on 28 Dec 1898, in... (Read More)