Alberta, California, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Manitoba, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia New Pages and Updates

While I have not posted updates to this blog since April, it does NOT mean I have not updated the site. On the contrary, I was very busy this summer posting new titles to the site. However, this fall, I started to have some familiar shoulder pain, and sure enough, I became a candidate once again, for rotator cuff surgery, this time on my right shoulder. I had the surgery on December 19th, and am still very much in the early stages of recovery. However, I can type one-handed, slowly, and so I decided that now was as good a time as any to inform you of the new titles and updates that were posted this past year.


New Pages

Alberta - with one title from NewspaperArchive


Updates

California - one new title from NewspaperArchive, and two from Google News Archive; corrected info on one title from Google News Archive

Hawaii - nine new titles from Library of Congress; expanded dates on three titles from Library of Congress

Iowa - two new titles from Library of Congress

Illinois - one new title from Library of Congress

Michigan - seven new titles from Library of Congress

Minnesota - two new titles from City of Brainerd

Montana - three new titles from GenealogyBank, 17 from Google News Archives, 21 from Library of Congress, 13 from Montana Memory Project, and 24 from NewspaperArchive

New Jersey - three from Cranford Public Library, two from Joint Digital Archives of Fanwood and Scotch Plains, two from New Brunswick Public Libray, ten from Rahway Public Library, two from Sadie Pope Dowdell Public Library, three from South Plainfield Public Library, and nine from Woodbridge Public Library

Oregon - four new titles from Ancestry, one from the City of Rainier, six from Gale's 19th Century U.S. Newspaper Collection, nine from GenealogyBank, 23 from Google News Archive, 65 from Historic Oregon Newspapers, 23 from Library of Congress, four from NewspaperArchive, 14 from SmallTownPapers, and one from the University of Oregon Libraries; expanded dates for one title from Library of Congress. At this point, Oregon's page is as complete as I am aware it can be!

Pennsylvania - seven new titles from LancasterHistory and one from Internet Archive (via LancasterHistory)

Texas - 29 new titles from Library of Congress, and two from University of North Texas Libraries; expanded dates for one title from Library of Congress

Washington - removed link to Tri-City Herald after determining it is no longer offered through Google News Archive

West Virginia - two new titles from Library of Congress

Manitoba - for some reason, this page was not linked to the Canada page, so the public didn't have access to it, unless they knew the direct link. Fixed. Added one title from University of Manitoba.

Videos and Tutorials for Your Newspaper Searches

The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program blog has a helpful article out with links various videos and tutorials available for different digital newspaper sites, including Chronicling America and the University of Illinois. Check it out here.

A Great Educational Resource for Newspaper Research

I'd like to recommend a website that is a great educational resource for newspaper research, The Ancestor Hunt by Kenneth R. Marks. Ken writes articles on his blog about where to find digitized newspapers online and how to use them to find what you want. He has a list of research links, as well as a number of genealogy books he recommends. The finest feature on his site is his collection of video tutorials that demonstrate step-by-step the various digitized newspaper collections online and how to search, browse, and utilize them.

Here's an example of one of his many videos. They are available through YouTube, and are free to watch.

Viewing the video on this blog may not work well, because of the small size. Just click on the logo "YouTube" right under the video to watch it full size on the YouTube site.

Happy learning!

Elephind: A Digital Newspaper Collections Search Engine

This post originally appeared on my AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors blog:

Thanks to a heads up from one of my Facebook friends, I learned of a great new search engine targeted specifically for searching in digital newspaper collections, called Elephind. In fact, it searches across 14 collections in four countries, with more to be added. These include such well known sites such as the Chronicling America (the U.S.'s Library of Congress) and Trove (National Library of Australia), as well as smaller collections like Door County Library in Wisconsin. The statistics are impressive: over 1,000 titles, nearly 1,100,000 issues, and over 45 million articles and items. The date ranges cover 5 March 1803 through 2 June 2011.

One can search across ALL the collections with both standard and advanced search features. The advanced search features allow one to search in both text and titles. I did a trial search for my children's unusual ancestral surname, Westaby, and came up with 65 hits; 56 from the U.S. and nine from Australia. Results can be sorted by relevance, newest or oldest publication date. Additionally, the results are listed by location, source (collection), publication (title) and decade in the left-hand margin, for ease of filtering. Using this site, I was able to find several obituaries and articles for the Westaby family that I did not yet have.

Veridian, the software behind the search engine was "signed specifically to organize large digitized newspaper collections and make them easily accessible to anyone online." Many of the collections listed at Elephind were originally created with Veridian. This allows the results to be "fast, accurate, and relevant." Interestingly enough, the site is hosted in the cloud, as are a number of the collections.

This search engine site is worthy of bookmarking and being added to one's genealogical toolbox!

Wyoming Newspaper Project Down Temporarily

I received the following message from Erin Kinney, Digital Initiatives Librarian of the Wyoming State Library:

This Friday, June 28, the Wyoming Newspaper Project will be down for a few hours starting in the evening, possibly into Saturday.  We are moving the newspapers to a new set of drives, ones that will be more stable, so we will no longer have those aggravating "Bad File Location" errors.  The data copying has already started, but the final switch will happen Friday evening.  Hopefully it will be fast with no problems.

Alaska, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Washington Updates

Petersburg, Alaska

Alaska - four new titles from the Petersburg Public Library

Indiana - seven new titles from the Library of Congress

Michigan - two new titles from Google News Archive

New Mexico - 27 new and two updated titles from the Library of Congress

Washington - ten titles from the Library of Congress

New Website for New Mexico National Digital Newspaper Project

I received an email today from Andrew Weidner, Project Coordinator of New Mexico Historical Newspapers announcing that the New Mexico National Digital Newspaper Project (part of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America program) has set up a site to link to their content at http://newmexicodigitalnewspapers.weebly.com/. From this site, you can view a map showing the locations of where the digitized newspapers were originally published, a timeline of when they were published, and links to all the titles so far digitized. You can also read the related blog and see how far production has come (look for both under About in the menu).

Additionally, the Library of Congress has notified the the New Mexico Historical Newspapers project that another 30,000 New Mexico newspaper images will go online soon, including many new titles. Mr. Weidner will update me as soon as that happens.

 

Online Newspaper Sites Terms of Use, Newspaper Copyright, and the Google News Archive

This past week, I've come across some tremendous resources that will be of help to those doing research in online historical newspapers.

The first include three articles from The Legal Genealogist's blog:

"Looking at the news sites" - this article compares the terms of use of three major online historical newspaper websites, Newspapers.com (the newest member of the Ancestry.com family), GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchive.com. This is important information to understand should you be using their digitized newspaper images.

"Copyright & the news reprint" - Judy Russell discusses copyright and public domain and how that affects using digitized newspaper images of whole newspaper pages as well as copies of hard copy newspapers

"Copyright & the newspaper article" - here's more detail about copyright laws and newspaper articles in particular

You can also search The Legal Genealogist's blog for copyright law as it pertains to obituaries, another newspaper-related topic.

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A new genealogy blog made its debut this week, the Enhanced News Archive. This blog is devoted to the topic of Google News Archive. If you've spent any time at the Google News Archive site, you'll find that unfortunately, all the digitized newspapers are listed alphabetically by title only and there is no easy way to determine if any of those papers came from your ancestral locations. Jose Munoz, of Enhanced News Archive has composed two extremely helpful lists. One is the Enhanced News Archive List with Locations in which he has listed all the locations of all the newspapers found at Google News Archive. The second is the Table of States 2, which lists all the American newspapers at Google News Archive by their location. The post "USA Only - Enhanced Newspaper Archive List"--despite its name--has downloads in Microsoft document form of both lists.

These lists are extremely helpful in determining whether your ancestral locations have newspapers digitized at Google News Archive. Jose did inform me that there were some general, rather than specific, locations listed and I did find a couple minor errors--Yukon Territory (part of Canada) being listed under Alaska, for instance--but as a whole, these are amazing resources and a great deal of work and time were expended creating them. I ought to know, as I've only started adding the titles beginning with the letter "B" to my Online Historical Newspaper site!

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I trust these two blogs will be of great assistance in your newspaper research!