Online
Newspaper Archives
Bob
Allum describes how you can add texture to your family history.
WHERE
DO YOU LOOK for stories about your grandfather playing football
for the school? Or a record of your great grandmother winning
a prize at the local fair? Or the report of your great uncle
being arrested for being drunk at the beginning of the century
the 19th century? The answer is the archives of the local
newspaper.
Until
recently, those archives were difficult to access, and almost
impossible to search. Most newspapers kept their archives
on microfilm and for the most part only three copies of
the film existed: one in the newspaper offices, one in the
local library and one in the National Library in Ottawa
(for Canadian papers) or in the Library of Congress (for
US papers).
However,
in the past year a number of companies have begun publishing
archives on the Internet bringing access into homes and
libraries across the world. As a great bonus, these archives
are now searchable, relieving the tedium of hours spent
in front of blurry microfilm viewers, scanning the pages.
For anyone who has spent time looking through microfilm
of newspapers, the new approach will seem like a miracle.
| NEWSPAPERS
are an excellent source of family history for many
of us. Most public libraries have microfilmed copies
of local papers reaching back into the 1800s while
larger libraries have the major city newspapers.
There
have been many problems associated with newspaper
research. First you normally have to travel to the
local library but this is easy compared to the problem
of searching a vast number of pages unless you have
a specific date.
Now
a number of newspapers have become available online:
the original images are there and are fully indexed!
We have browsed most of those available and have been
amazed at what we have found to add to our family
histories.
Only
a few newspapers (mentioned in the article) are currently
accessible but the technology producing this is remarkable
and is adding data at an extraordinary rate. According
to Bob Allum, author of the article, Cold North Wind
(who run Paper of Record) is able to scan microfilm
at 30 pages a minute and convert these pages to text
at the rate of one or two pages a minute (using optical
character recognition OCR). They are currently digitizing
up to 100,000 pages a week!
We
subscribed to Ancestry's newspaper collection and
the Toronto Star and were given temporary access to
the collection offered by Paper of Record. ProQuest
gave us access to the New York Times and the Wall
Street Journal. We understand that the London Times
will shortly go online while ProQuest are working
on the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post,
the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
Apart
from the large city newspapers, Cold North Wind believes
that there is considerable interest in the small town
newspapers. Certainly that is where genealogists are
likely to find the best family history gems. Almost
all the services are subscription based; the free
examples are very limited. However, as you can search
on key words, you can get through years of papers
in a few hours.
Unfortunately
it is not possible to subscribe to the major US newspapers
handled by ProQuest. These may only be accessed through
about 400 libraries and most of these are at colleges
and universities. Unfortunately a list of these does
not seem to be available. This is not a policy of
ProQuest but a condition of the newspapers that retain
the copyright. Readers who want to try to get access
to the these papers can try asking their local reference
library if they have access or if they know a nearby
facility where this can be done.
Until
now, it has been almost impossible to find information
on your family history in a newspaper unless you have
a date. As the information now available is all indexed,
it is now possible to find stories that are totally
new or for which you did not have a date.
There
have been many major milestones in conducting genealogical
research on the Internet: the IGI, Ellis Island arrivals
and census images spring to mind. The availability
of newspapers online has got to join this list.
Halvor
Moorshead, Publisher, Family Chronicle
|
From
Microfilm to the Intemet
Microfilming of newspapers on 35mm film started in the 1940s.
With funding from institutions such as the Rockerfeller
Foundation, libraries were encouraged to film their collections
of defunct newspapers for preservation. Newspapers still
in publication sent copies to microfilm houses for filming
and distribution to local libraries and schools.
Today, the three standard formats are 35mm and 16mm film
and microfiche.
Although
each publisher's process for retrieving archives from microfilm
or fiche varies slightly, and the results are somewhat different,
the basic steps are as follows:
Microfilm or fiche is digitized on a commercial scanner,
running at about 30 frames per minute.
The
resulting TIFF files are cleaned up by software, to remove
speckles and some scratches, to straighten images, and to
remove large borders around the pages.
The
page images are run through an Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) process that 'reads' the text on the page and turns
it into a searchable index of the page.
The
images are stored in a database which can be accessed either
by date of issue and page number, or by doing a full text
search to find pages containing words or phrases of interest.
What
Papers are Available?
The list is growing every week, but at the time of writing
the major publishers in North America have the following
collections or titles available online:
Paper
of Record:
www.paperofrecord.com
A collection of about 50 Canadian titles and a smattering
of international newspapers. The Canadian collection covers
the country from coast to coast, and the period from 1752
to the present. All papers are searchable, and pages are
displayed in PDF format so they can be saved or printed.
Subscription rate is $6.75 US for a week's access or $16.75
US for a month. Subscriptions are also available in Canadian
dollars or Euros.
Ancestry.com
Historical Newspapers:
www.ancestry.com An
eclectic assemblage of over 50 papers from 30 states of
the US. Most papers have only a few years represented, but
it is a growing collection and includes about 100,000 pages.
Very few recent newspapers. $79.95 US annual subscription.
Alberta
Newspaper Collection:
www.ourfutureourpast.ca
Scanned images from a variety of Alberta newspapers. The
images are accessible by date but are not searchable by
text. Image display is in JPEG format and the images are
very large. Access is free.
Halton
Newspaper Index:
news.halinet.on.ca
A collection of hand crafted indexes of names and events
in newspapers from Southern Ontario. Some fullpages have
been scanned, but in most cases you have to go to the microfilm
to get the full text. A small collection that is geographically
very concentrated. Access is free.
New
York Times Wall Street journal
www.proquest.com (the
website has little information on these papers see our introduction)
The entire collection of the New York Times (1851 1999)
and the Wall Street Journal (1889 1986) is available through
ProQuest Information and Learning. These are only available
through libraries and universities.
Toronto
Star
thestar.pagesofthepast.ca
Over two million pages, fully searchable, dating back to
1892. Pricing is $9.95 Cdn. per day (that is about $6.50
US).
What
to Expect from the Products
For those collections (such as Paper of Record) that are
searchable, you can enter a single word, a phrase (a string
of words that follow each other, such as 'Babe Ruth) or
a group of words (words that appear on the same page, but
not necessarily together, such as ‘Babe' and ‘baseball’).
You
will be given a list of pages that match the criteria. The
list is sortable, so you can organize it by date, by number
of hits on the page or by page number (so you can focus
on the front page stories, if you wish). From the list,
you can select individual pages and have them displayed.
Normally
the display is in PDF format, and the standard viewer from
Adobe makes viewing easy it provides all the necessary zoom,
clip, save and print tools you need to move around the page,
cut out individual articles and make copies of them on your
local printer.
For
those products that charge a fee, you can normally do the
search and see how many hits you get before being asked
to pay. You need to subscribe to look at the full page images.
Caution
Not
everyone will welcome this new service. Incidents
that people have tried hard to forget and hide from
relatives might now be discovered. Please act responsibly
and be aware of other people's wish to forget unpleasantness.
|
What
to Expect from the Newspapers
While the larger newspapers carried international and national
news, it is the community newspaper that is of most interest
to the family historian. In the small town paper of 1900,
or the special interest paper (such as the Irish Canadian
or the Toronto British Colonist) are to be found the myriad
details of life that provide a picture of an ancestor. These
are not in the birth and death notices of which there are
surprisingly few but in the other notices, advertisements
and news items (and, as the London Advertiser of 1880 puts
it Pithy Paragraphs and Piquant Persiflage).
For
example, the 8 November 1816 copy of the Niagara Spectator
contains a list of military widows' pensions. This shows,
for example, that Susan Butler, widow of Lt. Col. Johnson
Butler of the 4th Lincoln Regiment, was due a pension of
£81 13s 11d. but Catherine Hainer, widow of Lieutenant
George Hainer, was due only £42 13s 10d.
In
the 15 May 1902 edition of the Simcoe Reformer is a copy
of a letter home from Alf Sherritt who was fighting in the
Boer War. In his very moving letter, he tells of a 90 mile
ride through rough country and of skirmishes with the enemy.
Two days later, he was killed.
In
the Perth Courier of 20 May 1892 is the following snippet:
"Mr. C. Jackson had a narrow escape on his road to
Balderson. The horse stumbled, breaking a shaft, and stopping
the buggy so suddenly that the occupants were nearly precipitated
to the ground."
Such
details help us fill in the picture of the lives of our
ancestors and of the communities around them. For anyone
interested in the daily happenings of the past two centuries,
these collections of old newspapers are well worth dipping
into. Even if your particular relatives were not mentioned,
the gleanings are always interesting and often very amusing.
Bob
Allum is the executive vice president of Paper of Record
(www.paperofrecord.com).
This
article originally appeared in the February 2003 issue of
Family Chronicle.
