Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your #1 All-time Favorite Song

Some questions are harder to answer than they first seem.  And so it is with tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun question from Randy Seaver.

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

1.  What is your all-time favorite song?  Yep, number 1.  It's hard to choose sometimes.  If you made your favorite all-time Top 40 music selections, what would be #1?

2.  Tell us about it.  Why is it a favorite?  Do you have special memories attached to this song? 

3.  Put it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.   Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

I spent several hours thinking about this.  I'm a musican and a singer, and there are just so many songs I love!  Almost anything someone says can make me think of song lyrics.  I almost started to make a list of #1 song by category (favorite by recording artist, favorite in a movie, favorite performed in recital, favorite practiced for performance, favorite performed with the USC Marching Band, . . .).

Then I thought about it from the perspective of "what songs do I drop everything to listen to when they come up?"

And one clearly rose to the top:  "The House of the Rising Sun."

I'm familiar with the version recorded by The Animals in 1964, and that's what I hear in my head when I think about the song.  But it apparently has a much longer history, at least according to Wikipedia.  It's said to be a classic folk ballad, with the earliest published version of the lyrics dating to 1925 but references to the song going back at least to 1905.

Musicologists have studied "The House of the Rising Sun" for several decades, and most information about it is still conjectural.  No definitive origin has been found.  Researchers still can't agree on whether the "House" in question is a brothel, bar, or jail or whether there was an actual "House" in New Orleans that the song was written about.

Now, why is this my favorite song?  The lyrics speak to me somehow.  No, I have not spent time in a brothel or jail, thank-you-very-much, so that's not the reason.  I think something about the hopelessness and sorrow in the song.  They strike a chord with me, down deep.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Top 10 Free Genealogy Sites

I'm not really a fan of "Top 10" and similar posts, but at least I can come up a list fairly easily for the subject Randy Seaver has chosen for today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Last week we defined our top 5 or 10 fee-based genealogy websites.  This week, let's define our top 10 free genealogy websites!

(2) List your Top 10 (or 20 if you want!) FREE genealogy sites and a short reason for listing each of them.

(3) Share your list on your own blog, in a comment on this post, or on Facebook.  Please leave a link to your list wherever it is.

Drum roll, please:

1.  FamilySearch.org, absolutely.  Not only does it have a massive collection of records, it also has a wonderful wiki with great information on so many research topics.  Plus there are the FHL catalog, online digitized books, learning center, and the FamilyTree, if you want to have your tree online.  And all totally FREE!!

2.  Chronicling America.  Since I love newspaper research so much, this one is a natural, plus it's our tax dollars at work for us.  Chronicling America is the online collection that grew out of the mandate for all states to catalog and digitize their historic newspapers.  One day, all fifty states will finally be posted . . . .

3.  SteveMorse.org.  You can also find this site by going to StephenMorse.org and StephenMorse.com, but not SteveMorse.com.  Just remember, that guy is the imposter; the genealogy Steve Morse is the real deal.  Steve started working on his genealogy shortly before the Ellis Island database went online; when he discovered how badly designed the search engine was, he created his own, and it has only grown from there.  Not only does he have better search pages for Ellis Island, he also has pages for most of the major immigration databases and a huge list of BMD search sites, plus all sorts of cool tools, such as transliterating Cyrillic and Hebrew to the Latin alphabet and figuring out the dates for Easter and Passover every year.  And a whole bunch more besides those!  Oh, just go check out the site and bookmark it!

4.  DeathIndexes.com.  This is actually just one section of a cool site created by Joe Beine.  There are also links to sites for German research, immigration databases, Black research, county histories, and more.  Plus you can sign up for e-mail notifications of when new links are added.

5.  CyndisList.com.  This is still the granddaddy (or should I say grandmomma?) of genealogy portals.  It includes links to hundreds (thousands?) of categories of genealogy sites covering all sorts of topics, and more are added regularly.

6.  FindAGrave.com and BillionGraves.com.  These are two different sites owned by different companies (Ancestry owns FindAGrave; BilliomGraves is independent), but they're essentialy the same thing:  collections of data collated from tombstones in cemeteries and contributed by volunteers.  There's overlap between them, and each has information the other doesn't.  If you're looking for a death, check 'em both out.

7.  Family Tree Webinars.  This used to be an independent site, part of the company that created Legacy Family Tree software, until the parent company was gobbled up by MyHeritage.  The site itself isn't totally "free", but most of the Webinars offered are free to watch when they air and for up to a week afterward.  Lots of genealogy topics are covered, sometimes multiple speakers covering the same subject at different times.

8.  Wikipedia.  At first I thought of one specific page on Wikipedia, the List of Online Newspaper Archives, which I contribute to regularly.  Then I decided I should broaden the listing to include the entire site, as a free online encyclopedia is useful for research in so many ways.  But my favorite page is sitll the List of Online Newspaper Archives.

9.  U.S. GenWeb.  This is a volunteer contribution site for the United States.  It's broken down by states and counties.  You never know ahead of time what you're going to find for a given location, because you don't know what someone might have contributed.  So it's always good to check and see what is there.  And if you feel like contributing, or maybe vounteering to be the coordinator for a county that doesn't have one, so much the better.  Oh, and there is an archive of older U.S. GenWeb info, too.  (There is also a World GenWeb which works similarly, so check that out too.)

10.  Google.  Yes, I know, Google isn't actually a genealogy site per se, but you can use the tools to help you with your research, and it is free.  And as Randy pointed out in his top 10 list, in addition to Search (which I admit keeps getting worse and worse as Google continues to dumb it down for mobile users, but I still like it better than the alternatives), Google also has Blogger (the platform I use for this blog), Translate, Images, Books, News Archive, Maps, and more.

So there they are, my top 10 free sites that I use for genealogy.

Hooray for Newspapers!

It's amazing how quickly time can get away from you.  I knew it had been a while since I had posted the new additions to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page, but I didn't realize it had been eight months.  That's obviously far too long.  My only excuse is that I've been busy trying to move to Portland, Oregon, and it's amazing how much time it takes to do all the paperwork.

Lucky for us researchers, almost all of the newspapers added have free access.  The exception is the Friedens Messenger, for which you need to be a paid member of the St. Louis Genealogical society.

• Hungary:  Although the newspaper itself has closed down, the online archive of Népszabadság is being maintained for free access.  I don't read Hungarian, however, and I can't figure out what years are covered.

• Korea (new country!):  Yes, you read that right, Korea.  Not North or South, but just plain old Korea.  The National Library of Korea (in South Korea) has an online collection of newspapers published in Korea prior to 1950.  The link I posted is to the English-language interface, but the newspapers are in Korean.

• Mexico:  El Universal is online for 1999 to the present.

• Sierra Leone:  I discovered that Early Dawn, available on FultonHistory.com and incorrectly labeled as "Earley Dawn", is also on the Internet Archive and much easier to read, although the site notes that some issues are missing.

• California:  The Monterey Public Library has digitized its historical newspaper collection and placed it online for free.  The 34 newspapers range from 1846 to the present.  They are listed on the library's site in chronological order, which is a little different.

• Florida:  The Weekly Challenger, the newspaper of the black community of St. Petersburg, has partnered with the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, which is now hosting digitized issues of the paper for 1976, 1985–1988, and 2009–2016.  Plans are to to digitize more historic issues and add them to the online archive.

• Idaho:  The University of Idaho has digitized the historical run of Argonaut, the student newspaper, and posted it online.

• Illinois:  The Aurora Public Library has online indices for the Aurora Beacon-News for obituaries (1933–2004 with many gaps) and for a clipping collection (1925–1956 and 1963–1978).

• Illinois:  The Coal City Public Library has a searchable index for obituaries and death notices, most of which came from the Coal City Courant newspaper.  The index can be searched only by surname, and nothing on the page indicates what years the database covers.  I searched for Smith as a general test, and years ranged from 1884 to 2017.

• Kansas:  The Rossville Community Library not only has posted an obituary index online, it has gone the extra step and scanned and posted the obituaries listed in the index.

• Massachusetts:  Smith College has placed every issue of its alumnae quarterly, for 1909 to the present, online.

• Michigan:  Oakland County has an online historical archive site which houses what appears to be a substantial collection of digitized newspapers.  Unfortunately, I can't find a way to determine the names of the newspapers in the collection or what years it covers.  Seventy-four locations are listed on the browse page.

• Michigan:  The University of Michigan has an online archive of the historical run of the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily.

• Missouri:  The St. Louis Genealogical Society has posted issue of the Friedens Messenger, published by the Friedens United Church of Christ, for 1940 and earlier, although the range is not specified.  Paid members of the society may view the digitized files.

• New Jersey:  The Elizabeth Daily Journal for 1872–1915 (with more years to be digitized and posted online) is available courtesy of the Elizabeth Public Library.

• New York:  The entire run of the New Yorker, all the way back to 1925, is now available through the New York Public Library site with a library card.

• Ohio:  The Lepper Public Library has a collection of seventeen newspapers covering the Lisbon (formerly New Lisbon) area, ranging from 1810 to 2011 (with a lot of gaps).

• Ohio:  The Ohio National Guard has shifted its publication, The Buckeye Guard, from print to digital and has posted the archives of the print edition (1976–2011) on its new site.

• Ohio:  The Salem Public Library has an obituary index for 1938–2016 for the Salem News and will send you a copy of the obituary.  It also has the "Yesteryears" section of the News for 1991–2002 online.

• Ohio:  The Warren–Trumbull County Public Library has two indices for obituaries:  The Warren Tribune Chronicle for 1900–1949 and the Youngstown Vindicator for 2011–2014.

• Pennsylvania:  Elizabethtown College has digitized its students newspapers, Our College Times (1904–1934) and The Etownian (1934–2009), and uploaded them to the Internet Archive.

• Tennessee:  A near-complete archive of the original incarnation of Confederate Veteran magazine, from 1893–1932, including a searchable index, can be found on the Internet Archive.  I placed it under Tennessee because that's where it was published.

• Texas:  The Texas Obituary Project is a collection of scanned obits from LGBT publications, dating back to 1975.

• Wisconsin:  The complete historical run of the print version of the UWM Post, the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has been digitized.

• Multistate:  The Catholic News Archive currently has nine newspapers (including one issue from 1832!) from five different states and the United States in general.  This is a Veridian site (yay!), and more newspapers will be added over time.

• Multistate:  FamilySearch.org now has a database of GenealogyBank obituaries from 1980–2014.  Even though GenealogyBank itself is a pay site, this collection is free.

• Worldwide:  Catholic Newspapers Online is a portal collecting links to Catholic newspapers from multiple countries, both historical and current, and has 22 pages of links so far.

• Worldwide:  "Last Seen:  Finding Family after Slavery" is a collection of ads posted in newspapers after Emancipation, where people tried to find relatives from whom they had been separated, whether by slavery, escape, or the military.  Currently the volunteer effort includes notices one Canadian and thirteen U.S. newspapers, but the project continually grows.

• Worldwide:  The Mennonite Library and Archives in Kansas has placed online a large collection of German-language newspapers and other publications from German Mennonites.  The countries include Canada and Paraguay!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: The Day Your Grandfather Was Born

It's time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, and this week Randy Seaver has a mission that does sound like lots of fun:

(1) What day of the week was your grandfather born (either one)? Tell us how you found out.

(2) What has happened in recorded history on your grandfather's birth date (day and month)? Tell us how you found out, and list five events.

(3) What famous people have been born on your grandfather's birth date?  Tell us how you found out, and list five of them.

(4) Put your responses in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a status or comment on Facebook.

Considering that it was only last year that I finally confirmed my paternal grandfather's birth date, I figured I had to pick him for this challenge.

(1) My paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, was born April 6, 1903.  According to TimeAndDate.com, that date was a Monday.  (I'm not sure how "fair of face" my grandfather was, though.)

(2) Historical events that happened on April 6 during my grandfather's lifetime:

• In 1909, Robert Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole.
• In 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, officially entering World War I.
• In 1947, the first Tony Awards were presented.
• In 1957, Aristotle Onassis bought Hellenic National Airlines and founded Olympic Airlines (on which I have flown).
• In 1973, Major League Baseball's American League began using the designated hitter (a travesty).

(3) Famous people who were born on April 6 during my grandfather's lifetime:

• 1903, Mickey Cochrane, American baseball player and manager (born in Massachusetts on the same day my grandfather was born in New Jersey)
• 1931, Ivan Dixon, American actor, director, and producer
• 1926, Sergio Franchi, Italian singer and actor
• 1937, Merle Haggard, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
• 1947, John Ratzenberger, American actor and director

I found the information for (2) and (3) on Wikipedia.  It was hard to keep each list to only five!

(4) This is the blog post!

Newspapers, Newspapers, Newspapers!

I have been meaning to post another update of what has been added to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page for a while now, but I've been distracted by a lot of other projects.  I didn't realize it had been seven months since I last posted!  I'm trying to catch up, though, so here are some of the most recent additions.  One new country, Lithuania, and new state, Kansas, have been added to the list.  Several of the new archives are being created by one of two companies, Advantage Preservation (which does them with free access) or Newspapers.com (which makes them available for a subscription fee).

• Australia:  Honi Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney (New South Wales), has been digitized for 1929–1990.

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Prince George Public Library has eight newspapers, including the student newspaper for the College of New Caledonia, on its site, ranging from 1909–1965.

• British Columbia, Canada:  Simon Fraser University has a collection of digitized newspapers online, including the student newspaper The Peak and one group called simply "More Newspapers."

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Thompson-Nicola Regional District library is digitizing newspapers from the Kamloops area and has a selection available covering 1882–2014.

• Cuba:  Diario de la Marina is available through the University of Florida's newspaper collection. Years covered range between 1844 and 1961, but coverage is not continuous.

• England:  The Church Times, an Anglican newspaper, has an online archive dating back to its first issue in 1863 and including more than 8,000 issues.

• France:  Two collections of images from Excelsior, a weekly publication that published 20+ photographs in every issue during World War I, are available.

• Italy:  Nine months of the 1885 issues of Il Secolo, published in Milan, are on the Florida State University digital archives site.  The press release I read suggested that more issues will be coming at some point in the future.

• Lithuania:  A new country!  Someone has digitized the Vilna Provincial Gazette and posted it on the Internet Archive.  The years covered are 1838–1917, with a few years missing.  This was published while Lithuania was under the control of the Russian Empire.

• Mexico, Arizona, California, and Texas (under Worldwide category):  The Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press collection includes newspapers from Tucson, Arizona; Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; El Paso, Texas; and Sonora, Mexico.  The archive goes from the mid-1800's to the 1970's.

• New Zealand:  The Southern Regional News Index covers the Dunedin and Otago area for 1851 to the present.

• United Kingdom:  The Gazette has created an instructional video on how to search and use the online Gazette archives.

• California:  The GLBT Historical Society of Northern California has an online searchable database of obituaries (not just an index) for the Bay Area Reporter, a weekly newspaper covering the GLBT community primarily in the San Francisco Bay area, for the years 1972 to the present.  The Bay Area Reporter itself has an online archive that begins with 2005 and is working on digitizing its issues going back to 1971.

• California:  The St. Helena Public Library has the St. Helena Star from 1874–2014 available for free.

• California:  The now defunct San Fernando Valley Genealogical Society posted a collection of vital records abstracts on RootsWeb for Valley newspapers covering 1911–1945.

• Connecticut:  The Shelton Library has two collections of newspaper clippings.  The "Library Scrapbook" has clippings from multiple newspapers from 1923–1930 relating to the Plumb Memorial Library.  The "Servicemen's Scrapbook of Shelton Men & Women Serving in World War" has clippings from the Evening Sentinel from 1943–1945, so apparently those servicemen were serving in World War II.

• District of Columbia:  The Capital is online for 1871–1880 and is said to be a great source for research in the Reconstruction period.

• District of Columbia:  Quicksilver Times (1973–1985) and Unicorn Times (1969–1972) are available from the Washington, DC Public Library.

• Georgia:  The Macon Daily Telegraph for 1860–1865 is in the American Civil War Newspapers database at Virginia Tech.

• Illinois:  The Lake Forester for 1899–1940 is on the Lake Forest Library site.

• Indiana:  The AIM Media Indiana archive, which has eleven newspapers, is a pay site created via a Newspapers.com partnership.

• Iowa:  Central College in Pella has ten collections of student newspapers and yearbooks covering 1876–2006, but there are some gaps in coverage.

• Iowa:  West Branch newspapers the Local Record and Times, from 1866–1934, are on the West Branch Public Library.

• Kansas:  A new state!  There is an obituary index for Rush County at the Barnard Library site.  It covers 1878–1951.  Copies of the obituaries can be ordered from the library.

• Kentucky:  The Lawrence County Public Library has an online obituary index for the Big Sandy News that covers 1885 to the present.

• Louisiana: The New Orleans Christian Advocate, a Methodist newspaper, is only for 1850–1946.

• Louisiana:  Scanned ads from former slaves looking for family members and friends lost during slavery which were published in the New Orleans Southwestern Christian Advocate (1879–1885) — which does not appear to be related to the previously mentioned paper — are available for free online.

• Maine:  Digital Maine has the Old Orchard Mirror, a newspaper published only during the summer, for the years 1900, 1901, 1903, 1904, and 1914.

• Maryland:  The Annapolis Capital has been digitized and placed online by NewspaperArchive.com on a pay site.  The collection nominally goes from 1887–2016, but it goes straight from 1887 to 1918–1919 and then to 1929.  It looked continuous from then on.

• Massachusetts:  The Memorial Hall Library in Andover has three newspapers covering 1853–1925.

• Massachusetts:  The Newburyport Public Library has ten digitized newspapers available for free on its site, courtesy of Advantage Preservation.

• Massachusetts:  The Portuguese-American Digital Newspaper Collections, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, includes Portuguese-language newspapers from California, Hawaii, and Massachusetts.

• Massachusetts:  The (Mattapoisett) Wanderer, which also serves Marion and Rochester in southeastern Massachusetts, has an online archive for its entire publication history, 1992–2016, housed at the Internet Archive.

• Minnesota:  Two union newspapers, the Minneapolis Labor Review (1907–current) and St. Paul Union Advocate (unsure of years covered), are now online.

• Missouri:  The Houston Herald has been digitized and placed online courtesy of Newspapers.com for 1881–present and is a pay site.

• Missouri:  There are online indices for death notices appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch, along with instructions on how to order copies.

• Montana:  The Montana Newspapers project has some dupblication with the Montana Memory Project but includes many more newspapers.  The years range from 1885 to 2015.

• New Jersey:  The Belmar Historical Society has the Coast Echo and Coast Advertiser for 1881–1974 in PDF and searchable.

• New Jersey:  The New Jersey Hills Media Group has partnered with Newspapers.com to present three newspapers on a pay site.

• New Jersey:  The Woodbridge Public Library has digitized eleven local newspapers ranging from 1876–1970.

• New Mexico:  The White Sands Missile Range published its own newspapers, which cover 1950–1990.  There is a list of the issues that are missing, so if you have an old issue, maybe you can help!

• New York:  A new collection of four Staten Island newspapers has been made available, with plans for more to come.

• North Carolina:  The Nubian Message (1992–2005), the black student newspaper of North Carolina State University, has been digitized and placed online.

• Ohio:  The Stark County District Library has digitized eight newspapers in partnership with Advantage Preservation.

• Ohio:  The WestLife Observer (2013–2015) and the Westlake Bay Village Observer (2006–2015) are online at Westlake Library site.

• Oklahoma:  The Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College student newspaper, The Norse Wind, is online for 1948–2007.

• Virginia:  The Library of Virginia has the Charlottesville Daily Progress available for 1893–1964.

• Virginia:  The Prince William County Library System has a local newspaper index for 1993–present for three newspapers that have no other index available.

• Virginia:  The Pulaski County Library newspaper archive has five newspapers that range from 1893 to 2015.

• Virginia:  The Handley Regional Library System has an obituary index for the Winchester Star for 1896–1914.  This is a work in progress, and more information is being added to it.

• Wisconsin:  The Lake Geneva Public Library has searchable indices for obituaries, birth announcements, and local people in the news.  The site does not state which newspapers or years are covered, but an announcement from NEHGS said the obituaries were taken from the Lake Geneva Regional News and Lake Geneva Herald.  The local people in the news database iincludes the code LGNT, which I believe stands for Lake Geneva News Tribune.

• Multistate:  The Swedish American Newspapers collection, hosted at the Minnesota Historical Society, includes 28 newspapers from California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.  Total years covered in the database are 1859–2007.

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the funders for the Chronicling America digitization project, announced that the years which can be funded are expanding from 1836–1922 to 1690–1963.  This means that eventually we should see a much broader range of historical newspapers on the Chronicling America site.  You can read the press release here.

Online Newspaper Archive Round-up

It's been a couple of months, so it's time to post about the latest links to be added to the Wikipedia newspaper archive page.  Most of the new links are free, which is always appreciated.  One new country has been added, though I don't know how many people are researching Sierra Leone in the late 1800's.  Some of the new links are actually magazine archives, but they still seem to fit under the newspaper/periodical category.

I've been seeing many posts lately about college yearbooks being digitized, but that really is a different kind of publication.  What do you think, should there be a Wikipedia page collecting listings of online archives of college yearbooks?

• Saskatchewan, Canada:  The Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online collection has newspapers from many cities and towns, but I can't find a list of titles or dates that are covered.

• Canada (multiprovince):   The Drouin Institute has links to an English-language page with transcribed obituaries, which is free.  The Institute also has a paid subscription site which has newspaper images and many more records.

• England:  The Middle East magazine, a well regarded journal about the Middle East, has an online archive covering 1974–2014, available only as an institutional subscription.

• Sierra Leone:  The Earley Dawn, published in Bonthe from 1885–1892, has been digitized and is available on the FultonHistory.com site.  Heaven knows where Tom Tryniski found this microfilm!

• United Kingdom:  The Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps for 1903–present, plus index volumes for 1903–1965, is online.  It seems to be free, but I'm not completely sure.

• California:  The Hemet–San Jacinto Genealogical Society has an obituary index for the Hemet News, Press Enterprise, and Valley Chronicle, but no indication of the years covered.

• California:  The J, the weekly Jewish newspaper for the San Francisco Bay Area, has an archive going back to 1995.  The paper includes many wedding announcements, obituaries, and other life events.

• Georgia:  The Callaway Beacon was a weekly magazine published for the employees and families of the Callaway Mills Company in LaGrange, Georgia.  Issues from 1955 and 1957 are now online.

• Illinois:  The Polish Genealogical Society of America has posted indices of death notices appearing in the Chicago Polish-language newspaper Dziennik Chicagoski, for 1890–1971.  If you find an obituary you want, you can order a copy from the society,

• Indiana:  The Hamilton East Public Library has a newspaper index for Hamilton County, with no list of years or titles covered.  On the other hand, if you find a relevant article, they will send you a scan by e-mail for no charge.

• Michigan:  The Michigan Digital Newspaper Portal has links to individual newspaper sites and also allows you to search the entire collection in one place.

• New York:  The famous Yiddish newspaper The Forward/Forverts and two more Jewish newspapers published in New York have been added to the growing collection of Jewish newspapers on the National Library of Israel site.  I do not read Yiddish, so I am not sure, but I think the paper is searchable in Yiddish.

• New York:  A database of New York Evening Post death notices from 1801–1890 is in the collections at NEHGS.

• New York:  The Ram, the Fordham University student paper, is online from about 1914–2008.  It's hard to tell exactly what years are covered, as the dates are not displayed in order, even when I request the database to do so.  I have found articles about one of my cousins who attended the dental school at Fordham in the paper.

• New York:  The Troy Genealogical Society has added several more indices from newspapers:  a marriage index from the Burden Iron Company, and death notices from Troy newspapers for 1797–1860.  From the latter, notices for Revolutionary War soldiers and soldiers from other wars have separate lists online.

• Ohio:  The Toledo–Lucas County Public Library has posted an obituary index for the Toledo Blade for 1837–present.

• Pennsylvania:  Someone at the Adams Memorial Library has a sense of humor.  The Latrobe Bulletin obituary index for 1902–present has been dubbed the "dead-a-base."

• South Dakota:  South Dakota only recently was added to the Chronicling America collection, with five newspapers.  Now 13 newspapers covering 1875–1919 are online.

• Multistate:  Aviation Week & Space Technology has published an online archive of all of its issues, dating back to 1916.

• Multistate:  The Garon family newspaper articles is a collection relating to that particular family and its related lines.  The articles cover 1855–2013 and are mostly from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, but there are a lot of them with a wide range of subjects.

• Multistate:  The Media History Digital Library is a growing collection of periodicals relating to the histories of the movie, broadcasting, and sound industries.  One of the subcategories is even "Government and Law."

• Multistate and World:  Newspapers in Microform is a Library of Congress catalog of newspapers published in the U.S. and around the world from 1948–1983, downloadable as three PDF files.

Other Newspaper News

The Chicago Tribune has a beta site for its new archive search engine, which is currently free to use.  After the beta has finished, the site will  become a paid subscription one.  Coverage appears to be complete from 1857–1991, with some issues going back to 1849.  There is also a FAQ page.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has created a contest for people to use the Chronicling America database.  It wants people to create Web-based projects based on information from the newspapers in the database.  Prizes are $5,000 for first, $3,00 for second, and $2,000 for third place, with separate prizes possible for K–12 contestants.  The contest closes June 15, 2016.

NEH is also currently accepting proposals from institutions that would like to apply for grants to have their newspapers digitized and become part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.  The deadline for receipt of proposals is January 14, 2016.

Black and White and Read All Over . . . .

Several new links have been added to the Wikipedia online newspaper archives page, so I thought I should let everyone know about them.  All but two are free, which is always nice to hear.  Many more college student publications have appeared online; this seems to be an ongoing trend.  And there's one new country, Japan, which is one of the fee-based archives.

Australia:  The Ryerson Index contains publication information about more than 5 million death notices from 281 Australian newspapers, ranging from 1803 to the present.  The majority of the entries are from New South Wales, but other parts of the country do have coverage.

Brazil:  An older archive of Diario de Pernambuco, covering 1825–1924, is now available to go with the modern archive.  Maybe at some point the mid-20th century will be added?

Brazil:  The Diarios Oficiais ("Official Gazettes") of several cities and states are online.

British Columbia, Canada:  There are three new links for British Columbia, one index and two sets of transcriptions.  The index is for Victoria newspapers from 1858–1936 and includes BMD announcements, general news articles, and more.  The Qualicum Beach Family History Society has transcribed obituaries from many newspapers in the Parkville and Qualicum area from 1948–1994.  The second set of transcriptions is mostly BMD notices from British Columbia newspapers from 1861–1875.

Manitoba, Canada:  The Manitoban, the student publication for the University of Manitoba, is available for 1914–2012.  The Winnipeg Tribune archive currently covers 1890–1950, 1957–1960, and 1969, but there are plans to digitize and upload the missing years.

Québec, Canada:  McGill University student publications from 1875–2001 are on Internet Archive.  They include the McGill Gazette, McGill Fortnightly, McGill Outlook, Martlet, and McGill Daily.

Saskatchewan, Canada:  The Saskatchewan Obituaries Project is digitized scrapbooks of obituary clippings.

Canada (national):  The Drouin Institute has an online collection of transcribed obituaries from throughout Canada.  The site and the obituaries are all in French.

China:  Four more Shanghai papers published by the Jewish refugee community, three in German and one in English, have been added to Internet Archive.

Ireland:  PDF's of bound volumes of the Dublin Gazette from the 1750's to around 1800 can be downloaded from the Oireachtas Library Web site.  The Connolly Association has made available The Irish Democrat and its predecessor, Irish Freedom.

Japan:  The entire run (1897–2014) of the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, has been digitzed and is available as a paid subscription through an outside agency.  This is probably designed as an institutional subscription only, but I can't find the site, only the marketing materials.

United Kingdom:  A generous person has created two Google Custom Searches:  one for all the national British newspapers, and a second that includes 384 local, city, and regional papers.

Arkansas:  The Ashley County Ledger has an obituary index and transcriptions for 1965 to the present.  The Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library has an obituary index for local newspapers from the 1820's to the present.

Connecticut:  The Ferguson Library has provided an index to obituaries appearing in seven Stamford newspapers from 1830 to the present.

Georgia:  The Digital Library of Georgia has added two new collections:  Southern Voice, an LGBT publication, for 1988–1995; and six West Georgia historic newspapers covering 1843–1942.

Hawaii:  Two student publications from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa are now online:  Ka Leo o Hawaiʻi, a newspaper, for 1922–1949 and 2002–2010; and Ka Palapala, kind of a student annual, for the 1920's to the 1960's.

Idaho:  The Gooding County Historical Society has a page with downloadable Excel files with obituary indices for Gooding County from 1946–1947 and 1980–2011.

Illinois:  Illinois Wesleyan University has digitized student publications ranging from 1870 to the present.  The Illinois Digital Archives has added the Huntley Farmside for 1960–2000 and two collections relating to World War II:  The Herald (for Melrose Park and area) for 1941–1945, and clippings and index cards relating to servicemen from Park Ridge.

Indiana:  The Tell City–Perry County Public Library has an obituary index for 2010–2014.  The Torch, the Valparaiso University student newspaper, has been digitized for 1914–1992.

Iowa:  Granville and Newspaper Archive have worked together to place four Granville newspapers and a scrapbook collection online.

Louisiana:  Centenary College of Louisiana, in Shreveport, has four student publications online covering 1899 to the present, including one published in French.

Massachusetts:  If you had whalers in your family, you'll want to look at this.  The Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchants' Transcript for 1843–1914, published in New Bedford, is online courtesy of the National Maritime Digital Library.

Montana:  The Columbia Falls Columbian for 1891–1925 (I believe it is the complete run) has been digitized by Veridian.

New Jersey:  A scattering of issues of the Newark Sunday Call from 1871–1881 and 1881–1946 are available in two separate collections from Google News Archive.

Ohio:  The Cleveland Jewish News Digital Archive has added a few more historical Cleveland Jewish newspapers to its database.  The Cleveland Public Library has two indices on its site for several Cleveland newspapers, one for death notices and one for general news items.  Ohio Memory, the state digitization project, has added several newspapers to its collection.

Tennessee:  This one's a little different.  The Knox County Public Library has digitized and posted two years of the Knoxville News-Sentinel as a sample to motivate people to donate to a fundraiser to raise enough money for NewsBank to digitize the newspaper for the years 1922–1990.  The two years available are 1940 and 1982 (no idea how those years were chosen).  What I'm particularly curious about is whether the newspaper is planned to be available as a NewsBank subscription, since the library is raising the funds.

Texas:  Some death notices and news items were transcribed from two Arlington newspapers and put together as books, which have now been scanned and can be downloaded from the Arlington Public Library Web site.  The Dallas Voice, an LGBT newspaper, has been scanned for 1964 to the present and is available through the Portal to Texas History.  And Lamar University student publications from 1933 to the present have been digitized and are on the university library site.

United States (national):  Obituary Central is an index to obituaries from throughout the country.  Warning:  When you first go to the page you get an annoying pop-up ad.

It's interesting how digital partnerships work (or don't).  The Poughkeepsie Journal is online again, on its third host site.  I first found the historical Journal on Ancestry.com.  Then the license apparently expired, and it was not available for a couple of years.  Next it appeared on Footnote.com.  When Ancestry bought Footnote's parent company, it was unable to work out a license with ProQuest, which had created the digital archive of the newspaper.  The digital Journal has been offline for several years, collecting virtual dust on a virtual back shelf somewhere at ProQuest, and even the Journal didn't have access to it.  But now Ancestry.com and Gannett, the Journal's owner, have redigitized the newspaper, through to the present, and it's on Newspapers.com.  You can read a little more about the current situation at Dick Eastman's blog.

Were They Murdered?

Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885

I recently wrote about my discovery of the index to obituaries and other mentions of deaths in the Belvidere (New Jersey) Apollo/Intelligencer.  I now have all the copies, and while I am very excited to learn more about my ancestors, the most intriguing item was about a collateral line.

I was curious about this one when I found the names in the index.  The index entries for Joseph W. Sellers and Mrs. Joseph W. Sellers were on the same day.   I had wondered if maybe there had been a tragic accident and the two had died on the same day, or something similar.  But no, the story is even more interesting than that.

"Coroner Harry H. Davis, of Camden, said that the suspicious circumstances connected with the death of Joseph W. Sellers and his wife, and the fact that several other persons of his household have suffered with symptoms of poisoning, leaves but one course for the officials to pursue, and that is to make a thorough investigation.  The body of Mr. Sellers will be exhumed and possibly that of Mrs. Sellers also." (Belvidere Apollo, March 27, 1885, page 3, column 6, under "State Items"; image above)

When I checked my family tree for Joseph W. Sellers, I didn't find him.  I had to look for him in the 1880 census and work backward to determine that he was a great-grandson of Abraham Sellers, my 4th-great-grandfather; I had begun work on his father's line in the past but had not pursued it forward in time sufficiently to have learned about him and added him to my tree.  Joseph W. Sellers was the great-nephew of my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers, and therefore the first cousin once removed of my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, second cousin of my great-grandfather Elmer Sellers, and my second cousin three times removed.  (Not exactly a "close" relative.)

But he was a relative!  Now that I knew he was a relative, I couldn't leave that poisoning question alone, could I?  And down the curiosity rabbit hole I fell.  I jumped online and started searching for more information.  A couple of Google searches immediately found three more newspaper articles.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 20, 1885 that Joseph had died on February 15, supposedly from typhoid fever and fatigue contracted while taking care of his wife, who had died a short time before him.  The deaths were not considered to be suspicious until Mary Bowyer, a cook who had worked for the Sellers family, moved with the Sellers' son to another family, which apparently was going to adopt the boy.  Suddenly everyone in that family became ill, except the cook and the boy.  The doctor called in to take care of the family members stated that they were suffering from arsenic poisoning, which made people wonder about Joseph Sellers and his wife (Sallie, by the way, though she is identified by her own name in only one of the articles I found).

The next day, March 21, 1885, the Philadelphia Times carried more information on the developing story, on the front page!  The decision had been made to exhume Joseph.  More people, including a former housekeeper of the Sellers family, had come forward to say they had had bad reactions to food prepared by the cook, and a motive for the hypothetical poisonings was being bandied about.  Apparently Mary was very attached to the Sellers' son and wanted to have him for her own.

By March 22 the story had gained more traction and was being republished in other areas of the country.  The Indianapolis Sentinel ran a synopsis of the Times story and included commentary from the doctor who had attended Joseph, saying that he had observed no signs of poisoning and still believed Joseph had died of typhoid.

The next step was checking dedicated newspaper sites.  Searching for "joseph w sellers" and "joseph sellers" on Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchive.com provided several more articles.  All told I found almost twenty articles, ranging from Philadelphia and New York City (including the New York Times!) to Boston and Indianapolis, covering the ongoing question of the possible poisoning of Joseph and Sallie Sellers.  The articles were published between March 20 and March 27, 1885.  One article, from the Philadelphia Times of March 24, 1885, even ended on the chilling note that "[i]t was semi-officially stated that they [the Coroner, County Physician and Dr. Snitcher] were satisfied that Mr. Sellers did not die of typhoid fever."  I noticed, however, that I hadn't found anything from New Jersey, where they had died, or about a resolution to the investigation.

Next I looked at New Jersey links on the Wikipedia newspaper archive page.  None of the pages had any hits for "joseph w sellers" or "joseph sellers."  I also checked the newspapers on Google News Archive and found a local paper, the Camden Democrat.  Unfortunately, the only issues online for the 1880's were for January 1880.  I was starting to wonder if perhaps the matter had been a tempest in a teapot and nothing had come of it—notwithstanding the opinions of the coroner, county physician, and Dr. Snitcher—for otherwise surely there would have been more local coverage.

Then I remembered that FindMyPast.com has been adding many U.S. records to its site, including newspapers.  So I signed in to my account on that site and searched for "joseph sellers" in 1885 in the newspaper collection.  (I wrote in 2013 about how much I dislike the disastrously awful interface that brightsolid created for the FindMyPast.com site and then had the stupidity to port over to the FindMyPast.co.uk site.  I originally planned to allow my subscription to expire, but when I learned that the Family History Library edition of the site allowed access to only the index for the newspapers and not the images, I decided I needed the newspaper access enough to keep up the subscription.  It pains me every time I have to use the site, though.)

The first thing I noticed is that I finally had some results for New Jersey papers!  I found articles from the New Brunswick Times and Trenton Times that pretty much rehashed the same information I had found before, during the same period.  But then I saw an article from April 9, 1885 in the New Brunswick Times:

"The jury in the Sellers poisoning case at Camden agreed that the deaths of both Joseph W. Sellers and his wife were due to natural causes."

New Brunswick Times, April 9, 1885

Well.  It's good to know they weren't poisoned, but I have to admit it was rather a bit of an anticlimax.  On the other hand, a few valuable lessons were illustrated by my search for the answer.

First, and it's something I say all the time (even in classes focused on online resources), not everything is online.  The Camden Democrat, being the local newspaper, probably would have had more detailed information about this case and been able to give me a direct answer more quickly, but the only site I could find with any issues didn't have them for the right period.

Second, never rely on only one source of information when you're doing your research.  I started with a short item from one newspaper and ended up looking for information from thirteen sources (and finding useful info in most of them) before getting a fuller picture of the situation and finding out what happened in the end.

Third, more than one finding aid (i.e., index) for the same records can be really helpful!  I mentioned that I had searched on NewspaperArchive.com early on.  I didn't have any New Jersey results from that search.  But when I used FindMyPast.com, all the significant results were noted as coming from NewspaperArchive.  So that search found items that NewspaperArchive's own search didn't.

The last lesson has to do with a fact that I haven't mentioned until now.  Most of the articles talking about the possible poisoning mentioned that Mary Bowyer was "colored."  Considering the time period, I have to wonder how much that affected people's opinions of the likelihood of a poisoning having occurred and of her being capable of doing it.  Depending on what kind of research you are doing, you might need to take into account perceptions of the time.

Spurred on by this little excursion, I have found a few more pieces of information about the Sellers family.  FamilySearch provided the death dates of Joseph and Sallie, and the number of the microfilm roll on which the records appear.  I also found their son, Robert, in an index entry for the 1885 New Jersey state census; he was living with the family that was said to have wanted to adopt him.  I have not been able to find Mary in 1885 in New Jersey, although she was with the family in the 1880 census.  I am curious what happened to her.  More than one article mentioned that she was still in Camden during the investigations, and even that her residence was being watched.  Taking into account that her name was spelled Bowyer (most common), Bower, and Bowers in the articles (and Boyer in the 1880 census), however, who knows how she might have been enumerated.  Or maybe she decided that leaving the state was her best move and didn't stay around long enough for the census.

More Newspaper Links Added to Wikipedia Page

I was stunned when I discovered I had not written about new links on the Wikipedia newspaper archives page since last December.  It has been on my list of things to do, but somehow it kept slipping further down the list.  I'm glad I have caught up for a while, at least a little.  This batch has some locations with little available online, such as Kenya and Puerto Rico, plus I personally found the Belvidere newspaper obituary index very useful for my own family research.  If you're researching in Iowa, there are six new archives listed.  And all of these new links are free, just like last time!

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive on the Vanderhoof Public Library site has three digitized area newspapers.

• Ontario, Canada:  Digital Kingston has a site with newspapers going back to the early 19th century.  It overlaps with Kingston papers in the OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers Collection but has some earlier and some additional newspapers available.

• Ontario, Canada:  Thunder Bay Public Library has several downloadable PDF index files available on its site for birth/marriage/death notices, obituaries, social news, and even some World War I references for 1914.

• India:  The University of Heidelberg has digitized copies of most of the 1781 issues of Hicky's Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser.

• Israel:  Five newspapers have been added to the online holdings of the National Library of Israel, three published in Israel and two in New York.

• Kenya:  Virginia Tech hosts a digital archive of the Kenya Gazette.  Currently the collection runs from 1972–1989; plans are to digitize all issues of the Gazette, going back to the 1890's.

• Puerto Rico:  The Gazeta de Puerto-Rico has been added to the Chronicling America collection.  The date range is 1837–1893, but there are gaps.

• Arkansas:  Index to Benton Courier (Saline County) obituaries from 1930–present, downloadable as PDF files.

• California:  The San Mateo County Genealogical Society has downloadable PDF files with indices of newspaper birth/marriage/death notices and of obituaries (along with indices to various county records).

• Illinois:  The Evanston Public Library has a searchable index for the Evanston Review that currently covers 1925, 1966–1972, and 1999–2004.

• Iowa:   The Appanoose County Historical Society has an online archive of Centerville newspapers.

• Iowa:  The Monroe County Historical Society has an archive of newspapers for Albia and other locations in the county.

• Iowa:  The Museum of Danish America has digitized some Danish-American newspapers and a scrapbook.

• Iowa:  Sioux County has a second historical newspaper archive site, this one through Advantage Preservation.  The coverage is not the same as that through Newspaper Archive.

• Iowa:  Taylor County has an online collection of digitized historical newspapers ranging from 1859–2009.

• Iowa and Missouri:  O'Dell's Abstracted Newspaper Index covers southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri for 1859–2014.

• Minnesota:  The Great River Regional Library has an obituary index for the St. Cloud Times that covers 1928–2013, which is helpful, because the Times itself is available only for recent years via a ProQuest subscription database.

• New Jersey:  An index of obituaries and other death announcements has been created for the Belvidere Apollo/Intelligencer/Apollo Journal (as with many newspapers, the name changed over the years), downloadable as PDF files.  So far the index runs from 1826–1914, and the volunteer creating it plans to finish the entire run of the paper, through 1953.  I am thrilled this index is available online, because my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers published the newspaper under the Intelligencer name.  The index includes obituary listings for him, my 3rd-great-grandmother Rachel G. Sellers, my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, and a few more relatives.  (Though I unfortunately did not find a listing for Cornelius' step-brother, William/John Mathews.)  I will soon be sending a request for photocopies to the Warren County Library!

• New York:  The Troy Irish Genealogical Society has created an index of death notices appearing in Lansingburgh newspapers from 1787–1895.  It also has an index of death notices collected by the Burden Iron Company in Troy.

• Ohio:  Obituary indices for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1841–2012, downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Barberton Public Library has indices to obituaries in four local newspapers, covering 1892–1960.  They are downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Huron County library has online birth announcement and obituary indices for the Willard area.  I can't find a way to tell what years they cover.

• Oklahoma:  The Muskogee County Genealogical Society has an index to all deaths that were found in Muskogee newspapers, not just from obituaries and death notices.

• Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania State University is hosting a 1937–2014 obituary index for the Centre Daily Times.  Many years also have images.

• Pennsylvania:  The Lititz Public Library has a downloadable PDF file with an obituary index for 1877–1998 for two local newspapers.

• Rhode Island:  The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College, has been digitized from its beginning in 1935 through 1980, except for 1944–1945 (which I suspect will be added soon).

• Washington:  The Bainbridge Review 1941–1946 has been digitized and made freely available on the Kitsap Regional Library Web site.  The newspaper is significant because its publishers consistently published editorials railing against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  The project is also special because volunteers transcribed the articles instead of relying on OCR.

• United States National:  Transport Topics, the national newspaper for the trucking industry (I had no idea there was such a thing), has begun to post archival content free on its site to celebrate its 80th anniversary.

In other newspaper news, there was another sighting of a rare newspaper on Antiques Roadshow. In Charleston, West Virginia, a woman came in with issues of the 1945 Oak Ridge Journal bound in two books.  Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the town created to house people working on the Manhattan Project.  The woman's mother was the editor of the newspaper.  Looking at the paper's listing on Chronicling America, it seems that mostly a few scattered copies are known to exist, and certainly not the entire year for 1945.  As I said when a four-year run of the Confederate newspaper The Family Friend was appraised last year, how do we find this woman and convince her that these papers should be digitized and shared with others?  At least in this situation I think it's less likely she'll be tempted to turn around and sell them.

Unfortunately, I've had a negative experience recently with online newspaper listings.  I read a blog post where someone copied an entire section from the Wikipedia newspaper page, literally word for word — even including the internal Wikipedia links — and wrote about it as though it were their own work.  So many people believe that because something is on the Internet, they can just copy it and not credit where it came from.  Conveniently for the "author", the blog is not set up to accept comments.  Well, if nothing else, I consider this type of behavior a great way to learn who I would not want to work with or trust for research.

FGS and RootsTech: Thursday and Friday

On Thursday, the RootsTech part of the joint conference with FGS began.  This meant that the exhibitor hall opened!  I was ready and waiting at the entrance for the 10:00 a.m. opening because I wanted to go straight to the E-Z Photo Scan booth.  There had been lots of announcements prior to the conference about their free scanning opportunity, with the company having a goal of 100,000 photographs preserved the course of the conference.  The purpose of the promotion was to show off the capabilities of the Kodak Picture Saver Scanning System (I think I was using the PS50).  I have to say, I was extremely impressed.  Arnold Hutagalung, one of the company reps at the booth, was very helpful.  He showed me how to get started, and it was pretty smooth sailing.  I scanned almost 350 photos in half an hour!  That's all it took!  It took a little while longer to copy the files to my flash drive, and I was done.  I can't afford one of these, but I was told that a big focus of the company's marketing is FamilySearch Centers and Libraries.  I'm hoping we'll get one in Oakland.

After I retrieved my flash drive, I ran off to the far reaches of the Salt Palace for more FGS learnin'.  The outstanding session of the day was Craig Scott's talk on Civil War medical records.  When I wrote about my great-great-grandfather Cornelius Godshalk Sellers, I mentioned that he had been in the hospital twice, and I'm very interested in finding more records related to those incidents.  Craig started off his talk by warning everyone that if they would be uncomfortable seeing information about STD's, they shouldn't go anywhere near Civil War medical records.  Apparently STD's were the leading cause of men needing to go to the hospital during the war.  Craig mentioned that even George Armstrong Custer (then only a lieutenant) was treated for gonorrhea!  Craig explained things such as the levels of care men might have received, which records might mention medical information, the top two medical reasons for which men received pensions (diarrhea and dysentery), and several of the National Archives Record Groups in which records might be found.  I felt inspired, but now I need to go to Washington to do research!

The other great talk of the day was by Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist, who spoke about federal court records and how they can be useful in family history research.  (This was scheduled as a RootsTech session, though the only discernible "tech" connection I could find was the seven URL's she listed in her resource list.)  This was the first time I have heard Judy in person, and it was fun.  She discussed which types of cases could be heard in federal courts (and which couldn't), where records are held (almost nothing is online), and who might appear in records.  Beyond the expected plaintiffs, defendants, and judges, maybe you have a relative who was a court officer, investigator, attorney, witness, juror, bondsman, or someone in Customs, the Treasury, or the FBI?  Judy also talked about how you could follow people or an issue through a case and showed some interesting examples.  One man was prosecuted for running a still, and the file had lovely photographs of the still, from several different angles no less.  An inheritance dispute between some family members (which went through the federal court because it involved people in one state and land in a second state) included photographs from childhood to old age of the deceased man who had bequeathed the land, and fantastic family information about who was related to whom and questions of the paternity of a putative grandchild.  The cases she chose to showcase issues were on polygamy in the Utah Territory, and the famous Dred Scott case.  The decisions in those cases had lasting effects and are obviously relevant to families affected by them.

The best talk I attended on Friday was also by Judy, this one on justices of the peace.  After pointing out that, while originally the position was held almost exclusively by men of high social standing, not-so-prominent men could be JP's, Judy gave several examples of historical JP's, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.  A couple of unexpected justices were Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones (no, not about the genealogist), and the famed Judge Roy Bean.  We heard about the first known black American JP, Macon Bolling Allen, who was appointed in 1848 in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and the first female American justice, Esther Hobart Morris, appointed in 1870 in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.  Judy covered the varying responsibilities of JP's, what kinds of records might exist, and tips on finding the records.  Again, most of these are not online.

The other session I found particularly useful on Friday was a computer lab on finding and using online newspapers.  Yes, I know, I am the genealogy newspaper queen of the Bay Area :), but there is always more to learn.  The focus of the class was on telling attendees about large free online newspaper collections.  (They included the Wikipedia newspaper archive page I contribute to regularly.)  A short slide presentation showed the basic process of how newspapers are digitized.  Then everyone was instructed to go to the Indiana Digital Historic Newspaper Program site, create an account, and sign in.  After that we were told to do a basic search. None of that is too exciting, right?  The useful part was when the presenters explained in detail how the system to correct mistakes in the OCR worked.  This correction system is valid in almost all Veridian newspaper databases, so I tried it with the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which I use as an example in several of my newspaper talks, so I know of some specific mistakes there.  It was interesting to see the search results change after making a correction.  The search engine no longer finds the incorrect word, but when you search for the corrected text, the results still display the incorrect OCR reading.  I'm going to be adding this to my talks.

Other cool things on Friday were scanning another batch of photos at E-Z Photo Scan (thanks again, Arnold!), meeting Eric and Karen Stroschein of the Northwest Genealogy Conference (where I am scheduled to be a speaker), doing a group photo of California Genealogical Society members here at the conference, helping at the Association of Professional Genealogists booth during lunch, getting my photo taken with Randy Seaver (because I won my RootsTech registration through his contest), and talking with Schelly Talalay Dardashti, Thomas MacEntee, and Dear Myrtle.  The only real downer was the people at the GenealogyWallCharts.com booth.  They paid to have a promotional card inserted in the registration packets, saying that there would be free blank charts and free black and white charts available.  It seems that they didn't plan adequately for the number of attendees, whether ones asking for the promised charts or printing out color charts at the booth, and the booth people got grumpy and snappish and told me there weren't going to be any more free charts.  Sorry, guys, not a good impression to make on a (former) potential customer.

The other negative was that FGS' position as red-headed stepchild meant that less attention was given to that end of the conference hall.  Not only did the containers of ice water run out and were not refilled, even the attention to maintaining the women's room was minimal, and trash overflows were common.

==

My other comments about the conference are here for Tuesday and Wednesday, and here for Saturday and my overall impressions.

More Newspaper Links!

Here's another batch of links that have been added to the Wikipedia newspaper archives page.  I'm a little behind schedule on posting because of some recent health problems (just had surgery this morning!).  This is another interesting group, with more university student papers.  And all of the new links are free!

• England:  The Illustrated London News has posted an archive for the News and seven additional titles covering the years of 1914–1919, in conjunction with the World War I centennial.

• Ireland:  The Church of Ireland Gazette has added 1914 to its online archive.

• Alabama:  The University of Montevallo has a collection of newspapers from Montevallo and Shelby County.  So far there are five titles, with plans to add more.

• California - The Berkeley Public Library has an index to obituaries that were published in the Berkeley Daily Gazette.  The obituaries range from 1894–1979, but several years are not included.

• California:  The B'nai B'rith Messenger has been added to the collection of Jewish newspapers available from the National Library of Israel.

• California:  The Sacramento Public Library has purchased a digital archive of the Sacramento Bee for 1900–1983.  Currently the years 1940–1959 are online, with the rest to be added over the next four years (1960–1969 in 2015, 1970–1979 in 2016, 1980–1983 in 2017, and 1900–1939 in 2018).  You must have a Sacramento Public Library (available to all California residents) to use this NewsBank database.

• Illinois:  The Chicago Sentinel, which had a broken link for a while, is no longer hosted at the Spertus Institute but has become part of the Illinois Digital Archives.

• Illinois:  The Rock Island County Illinois Genealogical Society has posted obituary indices for the Rock Island Argus and Quad City Times for 2005–2013.  They will send copies of obituaries for a small fee.

• Iowa:  The Fort Dodge Public Library has a collection of 54 newspapers and two directories online.

• Michigan:  The Loutit District Library has searchable databases for birth announcements (1891–1959, 2001–present) and obituaries (1891–1979) from the Grand Haven Tribune.  These are indices only.

• Michigan:  The Flat River Community Library has two Greenville newspapers online for free:  the Greenville Independent (1857–1923) and the Daily Call (1922–1923).

• Missouri:  Scenic Regional Library in Franklin County has been working with the state historical society to digitize many historical newspapers from the area.  Currently fourteen newspapers from three counties, covering 1875–1950, are available.

• New Jersey:  An index to death announcements published in the Elmer Times from 1901–1940 is available from the Gloucester County Historical Society.

• New York:  A collection of fourteen newspapers from the Hudson River Valley, ranging from 1831–2013, has been put online.

• New York:  The Tompkins County Public Library has several newspaper indices available as PDF's.

• North Carolina:  The first 70 years of the Technician, the student newspaper from North Carolina State University, are now searchable and browsable online.

• Ohio:  The Tuscarawas County Genealogical Society has two index databases of death notices and obituaries, for 1954–1967 and 2003–2011.

• Oregon:  The student newspaper for Willamette University, the Collegian, has been digitized from 1875–2012 and put online.

• South Carolina:  The Richland Library has an obituary index for 1875–present for the Columbia area.

• Texas:  The Calhoun County Genealogical Society has created an index for local birth, engagement, and marriage announcements and obituaries, for the letters A–M.  They will send copies of items for a nominal fee.

Have you found a great item in the newspaper recently?

Another Round of Newspaper Links

I have the 1976 disco song "More, More, More" going through my head, because that's what is happening with newspaper archives:  More and more of them are being posted online, which is a great thing for genealogy researchers.  And we still always want more!  While I haven't been able to catch up to adding all of the links to the Wikipedia newspaper archive page, this is a list of the current additions, several of which are university student newspapers.  There is one new country represented:  Vietnam.  Oh, and all of the new links are free!

• Hungary:  An archive of newspapers from South Hungary covering 1910–1945 is now available.
• California:  The Contra Costa County Historical Society has an online index of obituaries from about 1855–1920, mostly from the Contra Costa Gazette.  The society also offers to mail you a copy of an obituary you find in the index.
• California:  Stanford University's Stanford Daily is available from 1892–2009.
• California:  The University of California at San Francisco's student newspaper, Synapse, is online from 1957–2013.
• Georgia:  Three historic Savannah newspapers — Savannah Georgian (1819–1856), Savannah Morning News (1868–1880), and Savannah Republican (1809–1868) — have been added to the Digital Library of Georgia database.
• Georgia:  The Southern School News (1954–1965), which reported on desegregation issues across the South, has also been added to the Digital Library of Georgia.
• Hawaii:  Another extensive collection of Hawaiian-language newspapers is online.
• Illinois:  The Bloomington (DuPage County) Public Library has an online obituary index that includes downloadable PDF's of many of the obituaries.
• Illinois:  The North Suburban Library, near Chicago, also has an online obituary index (index only, though) that covers roughly 1880's–1980's.
• Iowa:  The Iowa Old Press site, part of Iowa GenWeb, has transcribed articles from 19th- and 20th-century newspapers throughout the state.
• Iowa:  The cities of Mount Vernon and Lisbon (Linn County) have a searchable and browsable historical newspaper archive on the Cole Library Web site.
• Massachusetts:  The Boston College newspaper collection includes the BC student newspaper; the student newspaper published by Newton College of the Sacred Heart, a women's college; a Boston-area Catholic newspaper; and two additional Catholic-church-related publications.
• Missouri:  The St. Louis Globe-Democrat has an online name (for A–R) and subject index to their morgue of clippings.  The page lists the years covered as about 1930–1986, but a search for "smith" gave results from at least 1920–1998.  This is an ongoing project, with more entries being added to the database.
• New Jersey:  The New Brunswick Free Public Library has two newspapers available free, New Brunswick Daily Times and Daily Home News, that are also available on a paid site.
• New Jersey:  The Papers of Princeton collection includes the Daily Princetonian, Local Express, Princeton University Weekly Bulletin, and Town Topics, covering 1876–2013.
• New York:  The Columbia Spectator student newspaper from Columbia University is online from 1877–2012.
• New York:  Cornell University's student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, can be read from 1880–1981.
• New York:  The Vassar College student newspaper collection includes seven publications and covers 1872–2013.
• Ohio:  Kent State University's student newspapers from 1939–1969 can be read online.
• Ohio:  Wright State University's student newspaper, The Guardian, is available online for the years 1965–1982 and 2012–2013, with more to come.
• Virginia:  The Library of Virginia has an extensive collection of newspapers, ranging from 1809–1999 and including more than 65 titles.
• Virginia:  The Collegian, the student newspaper of the University of Richmond, is online from 1914–2013.
• Multistate:  Japanese internment camp newspapers from World War II are available on Densho.
• United States:  The American Legion has an online archive of several of its publications, including American Legion Weekly, American Legion Monthly, American Legion Magazine, and The American Legion.  The latter is available for 2003–2011, while the first three are said to cover 1919–1949.
• Vietnam:  The National Library of Vietnam has a collection of digitized newspapers covering 1890–1955.  The site is in Vietnamese.

Some big news:  Two new states, Nevada and South Dakota, have been awarded federal grants to digitize their historic newspapers, which will then be added to the Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper database.  Some South Dakota newspapers are already available on Chronicling America, and I look forward to seeing Nevada newspapers in the future.  Only thirteen states are not yet partners in the program.

Don't forget, if you find an online newspaper collection that isn't on the Wikipedia page, please add it, so it's easy for everyone to find!