The best old newsWe are rlaely lucky to be living in a digital age. Why? You now have millions of pages of historical newspapers available to you (many at no charge) whereas in the past, you would have had to visit certain libraries and spend a lot of quality time viewing the archives and microfiche readers.Here are some great places to begin your search of newspapers from the last century and beyond.Newspaper searchesChronicling America: Historic American newspapers This free site allows you to search by date and keywords, as well as view newspaper pages from 1860-1922. It’s free because Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).NewspaperArchive.com They say they’re thea0world’s largest online newspaper archive, this site offers millions of newspaper articles from 1759 to the present. Paid membership is required to access records, but you can search for free to see if any helpful info is available.Newspaper Abstracts This website is comprised of newspaper abstracts and extracts, contributed by people to help others with the same interests expand their research.Google News Archive Google has quietly assembled a great search tool for historical archives linking you to both free and paid results. As a bonus, their search can automatically create timelines to show selected results from relevant eras.
New feature: Automatic record search results
MyHeritage users now receive automatic record search results when browsing profile pages of family tree individuals.
Family tree profile, now with automatic records (click on the image to view full size)
Everyone at MyHeritage was delighted to welcome WorldVitalRecords.com to our family. See our blog post about the acquisition here. This allows MyHeritage users to benefit from World Vital Records and its database containing billions of historical records.
We have started integrating the two sites and, as a start, we’ve made it easier and faster for our users to view and access historical records from within MyHeritage.com.
If a MyHeritage family tree individual profile has record matches, a green button will appear in the top right corner. Click it and you’ll get a breakdown of the records found.
Breakdown of records found (click on the image to view full size)
Another click will show you the relevant records on WorldVitalRecords.com, which may be census, birth, marriage or death records, or a myriad of other record types available, often including scans of the original documents.
For details on WorldVitalRecords.com subscriptions, see our previous blog post.
The new feature proved useful in my recent personal research. UK census records for my maternal great-great-grandfather were found instantly.
1. Instant record results for my maternal great-great-grandfather (click on the image to view full size)
2. Records breakdown from WorldVitalRecords for William Wrangles.
3. Transcript of William Wrangles' 1891 UK census entry on WorldVitalRecords.
4. Original 1891 UK census record from WorldVitalRecords
This is a major time-saving tool. If there’s one thing I’d like to get back from my genealogy research, it’s some of the hours spent doing speculative searches.
Why not take a look now? Click on someone you’ve yet to research. Who knows? You might just find something amazing.
Wishing you good luck in your research.
Tony Strasser
December 20, 2011
Now this example is for a unique name and so the result is immediately relevant. For more common names further filtering by say date range (if present) and location would assist in isolating the relevant records.