One missing record rarely means the answer is lost forever. Every genealogist eventually searches for a record that cannot be found. Perhaps a birth record is missing. A marriage record was never located. A census page appears to have disappeared. After enough unsuccessful searches, it is easy to believe that the missing record has brought […]
Author: Kenneth R Marks
Kenneth R Marks was born and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving a BS in Mathematics in 1968. His career was in Information Technology; with the last 20 Years as a software executive with Boeing, Pearson, and NASA. His genealogy career began in 2004. He is an expert in newspaper research for genealogy, as well as additional genealogy topics. He regularly conducts webinars on the subject and has authored three genealogy books. See the About page for more details.
The Ancestor Hunt, founded in 2008, is focused on helping genealogy and family history researchers of all skill levels to achieve their goals, by providing links to free online genealogy collections, and search tips and techniques, largely via easy-to-understand Quick Reference Guides.
Not every newspaper distortion originates with the reporter, typesetter, or editor. Some occur decades later when historic newspapers are digitized and scanned. If a page is slightly tilted, folded, warped, or poorly aligned during scanning, OCR software may struggle to determine where one column ends and another begins. The result can be a jumbled reconstruction […]
When the timeline doesn’t make sense, your conclusion probably doesn’t either One of the most effective genealogy tools is also one of the most overlooked—a simple timeline. Researchers often collect records one at a time without arranging them in chronological order. As a result, impossible dates, conflicting events, and mistaken identities can go unnoticed. A […]
Sometimes a name is spelled correctly—almost. A single pair of letters may be reversed during typesetting, transcription, or OCR processing, creating a variation that looks obvious to the human eye but completely invisible to a search engine. These transposition errors occur when letters switch places within a word, producing names that appear legitimate at a […]
MyHeritage continues to add or update its record collections at a fast pace for us to search. For July 1-31 2026, there are 2 new and 15 updated collections. The new and updated collections are: I hope that some of these are what you have been waiting for! Good Luck and Happy Hunting!
The British Newspaper Archive, a subscription site owned by FindMyPast, has updated its website. They used to have the ability to list the titles added and updated in the last 30 days, which is what was used to create this monthly update. It remains to be seen how this list can be created in the future. […]
Find My Past is an underappreciated source for digitized newspapers. It is a subscription site that specializes in British and Irish newspapers. Currently, its collection numbers over 106 million pages and is growing rapidly. This month, Find My Past added 19 new titles and added to 116 existing titles. They are listed below: New Titles Updated […]
Ancestry.com continues to add or update its record collections at a fast pace for us to search. For the period of July 1-31, 2026, the new and updated collections are: I hope that some of these are what you have been waiting for! Good Luck and Happy Hunting!
Newspapers.Com is one of the larger subscription newspaper sites. At the date of this publication, they claim over 1.24 billion digitized pages from over 31,000 titles. Here is a list of the new titles from the past month. United States California Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maryland Minnesota Missouri New Mexico New York North […]
FamilySearch continues to add or update its record collections at a fast pace for us to search. For the period of July 1-31, 2026, the added/updated collections are: For a complete list of all added/updated collections, go to https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list I hope that some of these are what you have been waiting for! Good Luck and […]