When entering our search criteria in the search box on an online historical newspaper site, we often focus primarily on the name of the target ancestor or family. We might also search for a location or an address. or combine these with a name. My guess is that well over 90% of online newspaper searches […]
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.
In 2018 and 2019, I expanded the resources that I have made available on The Ancestor Hunt website. Besides free Online Historical Newspaper Links, I have added Obituary Indexes (which are found in the Obituaries), and Birth, Marriage, and Death Record Links (found in the BMD Links). It occurred to me that it would be […]
I have been having discussions for the last few months with my friend Alan Martin about recording one’s family history as an alternative or adjunct to writing it. I have been writing my ancestor’s family history through blog posts on my two family history websites for years. I fully intend to write a book about one […]
As genealogy researchers, we aspire to see what our ancestors looked like – what they wore, their surroundings, where they lived, etc. Sometimes the names of the individuals are cited in these photo archives and sometimes not. So as another benefit we may find additional ancestors with the same surnames, even though the photo itself […]
As you know, if you have visited this site previously, I have been presenting historical newspaper links to Free online collections in Canada over the past few years. To see all these collections, click on the Newspaper Links tab at the top of this web page. Since the college/university experience is a sizable part of one’s life, […]
When researching historical newspapers online, we often have some basic capabilities used by most of the underlying search engines. For example, one basic search that all of the search engines have is to enter one or multiple words in your search box. For multiple words, the engine generally assumes that without entering search operators such […]
Prior to 1935 or so, I had approximately a dozen ancestors/relatives living in or around Berlin. As they were Jewish, their lives were already extremely difficult and about to become impossible. In the next ten years (from 1935 to 1945), three were murdered in the concentration camps; one died of “natural causes” – he was […]
This article has been updated and is more current (with more links). The current version is Free Online Canada Obituaries and Obituary Indexes. Please use this new link.
Chronicling America, through its new labs.loc.gov capability, is adding crowdsourcing of historic newspaper cartoons and photographs, which will allow users to provide captions for these images. From the announcement of this new feature, entitled “Beyond Words”: “The Library of Congress today launched labs.loc.gov, a new online space that will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and […]
I have been an historic newspaper research addict for a long time. In the past several years I have decided to ratchet up my interest and share what I have learned through newspaper research-related blog articles, huge link lists, as well as video tutorials. The link lists for each state in the U.S. can be found at […]