Not every newspaper distortion involves misspelled names or poor OCR. Sometimes the problem is simply spacing. In the era of hand-set type, compositors frequently adjusted the spacing between letters and words to make columns align neatly. Names containing prefixes, apostrophes, or multiple words were especially vulnerable. What appeared perfectly readable in print can become fragmented […]
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.
Sometimes the fastest way to find your ancestor is to stop looking at your ancestor. When researchers hit a brick wall, the natural reaction is to search harder for the same person. Unfortunately, that approach often overlooks the people who shared your ancestor’s life. Ancestors lived as part of families, neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and communities. […]
From Elephind: Elephind currently searches 47,119,848 pages from the 4,444 newspaper titles listed below. We still have over 150 million pages and thousands of titles to add — and this number continues to grow. Here is a list of all the titles for searching at Elephind: Start exploring at Elephind.com
As newspapers moved from paper archives to digital databases, many collections relied on human operators to manually rekey articles, indexes, and metadata. While this process made newspapers searchable, it also introduced a new layer of errors. Characters that looked similar on a screen or in a faded original document were often entered incorrectly, creating mistakes […]
The first record you find is often the beginning of the story—not the end of it. Finding an important record is exciting. A census, birth record, marriage license, or obituary can feel like the answer you’ve been searching for. But one record rarely tells the entire story. Every record was created for a specific purpose, […]
When you do not record where you searched, yesterday’s dead end can become tomorrow’s wasted hour. Genealogy research often involves searching many websites, databases, repositories, record collections, name spellings, locations, and date ranges. Without a record of those searches, it becomes surprisingly easy to repeat the same work. A search that produced no useful result […]
One of the most frustrating challenges in newspaper research occurs when multiple people in the same community share the same name. In large cities and small towns alike, common names such as John Brown, Mary Smith, or William Johnson often belonged to several unrelated individuals living at the same time. Newspapers rarely provided enough detail […]
A missing record does not mean a missing ancestor—it usually means you haven’t found the right place to look yet. One of the quickest ways to stall a genealogy project is to assume that if a record cannot be found, it never existed. Historical records disappear for many reasons. Courthouses burned. Counties changed. Records were […]
Researchers often assume that the OCR text displayed by a newspaper database represents the complete article. In reality, many databases index only a portion of the text or create excerpts that end abruptly when a column continues elsewhere on the page. Important details—including names, places, and relationships—may appear just outside the indexed section, causing researchers […]
The record that proves your theory wrong may be the one that leads you to the right ancestor. Every genealogist develops theories while researching. The problem begins when we accept only the records that support those theories and quietly ignore those that do not. Conflicting records are not inconveniences—they are opportunities to discover a more […]