Getting More from Old Newspapers
Search strategies that beat bad OCR, the sections genealogists overlook, and how to find papers that aren't online.
Newspapers record things no government ever did: who visited whom, who was sick, who moved to Kansas, who won the county fair. Millions of pages are now searchable online, but searching them well takes some technique. Here is how to find more than the obituary.
Why searches miss things
Digitized newspapers are made searchable by OCR (optical character recognition), software that reads the scanned page. On old, faded or crowded pages, it makes a lot of mistakes. "Miller" might be read as "Mlller," "Millcr" or "Mil-" at the end of a line. The record is there; the search just can't see it.
Search strategies that work
- Search fewer words. Try just the surname and the town, not a full name.
- Try variations: initials ("J. W. Miller"), titles ("Mrs. John Miller," which is how married women were usually named), nicknames, and common misspellings.
- Use wildcards if the site allows them: "Mil*er" catches several OCR errors.
- Search for someone else: a spouse, a sibling with a rare first name, or the family's farm or business name.
- Narrow the date range and place, then browse page by page when you know an event happened in a certain week.
Sections genealogists overlook
- Local and social columns: small-town papers had columns for each nearby community, reporting visits, illnesses, travel and gatherings. "Mrs. Miller of Dayton is visiting her daughter, Mrs. Ash" can identify a married daughter.
- Legal notices: probate notices to heirs, sheriff's sales, divorce notices, and lists of delinquent taxpayers. Probate notices sometimes list every heir and where they lived.
- Letters lists: post offices published lists of uncollected mail, showing who was in town.
- Court news: lawsuits, criminal cases and naturalizations.
- Anniversaries and reunions: a 50th anniversary article can recap a whole family's history, often with a photo.
- "Years ago" columns: many papers reprinted news from 25 or 50 years earlier.
Don't stop at the English-language press
Immigrant communities published thousands of newspapers in German, Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Norwegian and other languages. They often covered their readers in far more detail than the English papers did, including births, marriages and news from the old country. African American newspapers did the same for Black communities that mainstream papers often ignored.
Finding papers that aren't online
Only a fraction of America's newspapers have been digitized. To find the rest:
- Search the Library of Congress's U.S. Newspaper Directory, through Chronicling America, to see what papers were published in a town, and where copies survive.
- Check the state library or state historical society, which usually holds the largest microfilm collection for the state.
- Ask the local public library, which may have its own paper on microfilm and might do a lookup for you.
- Borrow microfilm through interlibrary loan, where it's available.