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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]