Major Breakthrough: 3.4 Billion Records Extracted From Historical Newspapers Were Added to MyHeritage

We’re happy to announce the publication of four huge new collections of names and stories on MyHeritage, extracted from newspaper pages on OldNews.com. The collections contain 658 million records from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; 998 million records from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska; 1 billion records from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; and 651 million records from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia.

The new collections are searchable on MyHeritage, with the full images of the newspaper pages available on OldNews.com via direct links from MyHeritage.

This treasure trove of genealogical information is just the beginning: these are the first four of 16 similar collections that we are planning to publish in December 2024. The full suite of collections, covering the entire United States and several additional countries, will collectively add more than 10 billion records to MyHeritage’s historical database, expanding it by 50%!

As part of this update, we’re also thrilled to share that OldNews.com now hosts more than 300 million newspaper pages!

Search the new collections now:

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia

The importance of newspapers for genealogy

Vital records like births, marriages, and deaths, are the important building blocks of genealogy, providing names, dates, places and relationships. However, they are typically bare bones and offer no color about the lives of one’s ancestors, their personalities, achievements and hardships. By contrast, historical newspapers are much richer, more detailed, and they do provide all the juicy details that vital records lack, including, in some cases, photographs. Newspaper articles offer glimpses into the daily lives, accomplishments, and challenges of individuals from generations past. For genealogists, newspapers often hold the missing pieces of family puzzles: Obituaries describe the person’s life history and impact on the local community; Community news articles bring to life the context of your ancestors’ lives: where they lived, worked, and contributed to society; Local achievements offer insights into their personalities and legacies. There are many other types of stories that can add much color to the family tree.

What’s special about the new collections

Despite their importance, historical newspapers have often been difficult to search effectively. With MyHeritage’s cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, we’ve turned this underutilized resource into a goldmine of genealogical information.

The new collections allow MyHeritage users to uncover rich information about their ancestors that was previously out of reach. This is because they are indexed and structured, so they can be searched using imprecise names, nicknames and synonyms; whereas searching in newspapers that are not indexed (i.e. raw text, like articles published online that are searchable by Google) is typically done using keywords and requires the user to write the name exactly as it appears in the newspaper.

For example, if your ancestor was named Frederick, you can now find him in an important newspaper article on MyHeritage even if you search for him by the name of Fred and he happens to be mentioned in that newspaper with his original name of Friedrich.

As another example, if a newspaper article describes a marriage that took place “on Wednesday last week”, MyHeritage will analyze the publication date of the article and understand and store the full date of the marriage, allowing you to find it by date. This would not have been possible if you had been searching solely based on keywords mentioned in the article.

As a third example, if an article is about Mr. Wilson and further below it mentions that his wife was named Maggie, MyHeritage will understand that a person named Maggie Wilson exists and index it, and users will be able to find that article when searching for her name.

For these reasons, the new index collections are not only easy to search but also create an excellent foundation for MyHeritage’s powerful matching technologies. Users with a family tree on MyHeritage will soon receive exciting matches with the new collections, notifying them about articles in which their ancestors and relatives appear without having to search for them manually.

The structured records in the new collections were extracted from nearly 200 million English newspaper pages using cutting-edge AI technology developed by the MyHeritage team. This AI is designed to extract not just names from the newspaper articles but also the relatives of every person mentioned, as well as additional fields such as occupations, residences, travel from one location to another, and more.

Information in the new records

Records in the new collections typically include the name of the individuals mentioned, with first and middle names, last names and maiden names clearly identified, the relationships between the individuals, the newspaper name, the publication place and date, and a snippet of text from the newspaper containing the reference.

Records may also include dates and places of life events such as birth, marriage, death and burial. Records often include additional details such as residences, occupations, and associated locations and institutions.

Last but not least, every record includes a useful summary of the article, generated automatically by AI.

Pricing

Anyone can search through the new collections on MyHeritage. Only MyHeritage subscribers (Data, Complete, or Omni) are able to view the records, which include a text snippet from the article. An Omni plan, or an OldNews Pro plan, is required to view the full newspaper images on OldNews.com.

The Omni plan is MyHeritage’s most comprehensive subscription plan. Omni is a superset of MyHeritage’s Complete plan. It includes full access to all features and content on MyHeritage available with the Complete plan, plus all newspapers on OldNews.com, a Geni.com Pro plan, all 2,000+ genealogy and DNA webinars on Legacy Family Tree Webinars, and unlimited photo scanning using MyHeritage’s mobile apps. Omni also includes extended usage of the new LiveMemory™ feature.

Examples

The record below from the Names & Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com (North Carolina, South Carolina, District of Columbia) collection is about Samantha Plummer, 69, the oldest nurse in the US army. The record includes her birth information, residence, education, occupation, military service details, and age – all automatically and accurately extracted from the newspaper article via MyHeritage’s AI.

The original newspaper article from 1926 even has her photo. Source: OldNews.com.

Another example from these collections is this record for Gertrude Sibert in Names & Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi), extracted from The Augusta Herald from June 7, 1916.

The article summary explains that the Siberts hosted a dance at Rex Hall for their daughter Gertrude.

Below the snippet, you can see the names of individuals mentioned in the article.

Clicking on “View full newspaper page” opens the result on OldNews.com in a new window, where you can see the full newspaper page and read more about the gown of the hostess, the orchestra and the decorations, as shown in the original newspaper article below on OldNews.com.

The final example below is an interesting record from the Names & Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com collection (North Carolina, South Carolina, District of Columbia). It features Miss Jackie Carvan, a 19-year-old who performed a daring stunt in Cincinnati by jumping into a tank of water from a 60-foot platform—while mounted on a horse!

By clicking to view the full newspaper article on OldNews.com, you’ll see a photo of Jackie seated on her horse in mid-air. The article, titled “Leaps 60 Feet to Tank on Horse,” also describes how Jackie set a new world record with this incredible feat.

Here is a zoom in on the story:

Nowadays, such a dangerous stunt involving an animal would not be permitted.

Surprisingly, Wikipedia has no entry about this remarkable woman and the world record she set. This makes OldNews.com and MyHeritage among the only sources where genealogists can learn this information about her. But genealogists like us never resist a mystery, and we did find a video of her historical jump from 1923 on Wikimedia, for those interested.

Summary

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of 4 huge collections of names and stories on MyHeritage, that were extracted from newspapers on MyHeritage’s newspaper website, OldNews.com.

These collections showcase cutting-edge AI developed by MyHeritage that unlocks new insights from vast, almost untapped resources. This AI technology is unrivaled by any other genealogy company, as MyHeritage continues to lead the pack in utilizing AI to advance genealogy. We hope that these collections lead to incredible discoveries for our users, allowing them to find the stories that shaped their family’s history.

The new collections contain 3.4 billion records. In the next few weeks, we plan to publish 12 more similar collections. In aggregate, these collections will add more than 10 billion records to MyHeritage. The upcoming collections will be sourced from newspapers from additional states in the United States, and from Australia, the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand. Furthermore, we plan to expand this technology soon to include newspapers in languages other than English, beginning with French. The future is very exciting, so stay tuned for updates!