Category: Newspapers

Virginia Chronicle regularly adds or updates newspaper titles for the collection. Last month, 22 titles were added or updated (Information provided by Veridian Software, which powers the Virginia Chronicle website). Here is the list of titles: To access the site, go to Virginia Chronicle

Veridian Software has many clients with collections of digitized newspapers that can be searched for free. Over 250 million pages currently. They power the newspaper collections of California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. And country-wide collections, such as Estonia, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and Switzerland. Veridian is the name of […]

Long before newspapers were digitized, they endured decades of physical handling, storage, and preservation. Many were folded for delivery, stacked in attics, stored in boxes, or bound tightly into library volumes. Over time, fold lines, creases, tears, and worn edges damaged portions of the printed text. When these pages were later scanned, missing letters and […]

Genealogists often assume that important life events will appear in predictable places. Obituaries should be in the obituary section. Wedding announcements should be in the society pages. Funeral notices should appear near the death notices. Newspapers, however, did not always follow modern organizational rules. Editors frequently placed personal news wherever space was available, causing family-related […]

GenealogyBank, a subscription newspaper site, has announced its updates for last month. There are 25 New Titles and 6 Titles that have had issues added in the previous month. From GenealogyBank: Here are some of the details about our most recent U.S. newspaper additions: To see our newspaper archives’ entire title list of more than […]

Not all newspaper distortions occur within the body of an article. Some appear in headlines, memorial notices, advertisements, and decorative boxes where editors used ornamental typefaces and extended dashes to attract attention. While these designs looked elegant in print, they often confuse modern OCR software. Names surrounded by decorative symbols, stretched across a page, or […]

In digitized newspapers, text doesn’t always stay in its proper place. When columns are close together—or when there are borders, rules, or advertisements—OCR software can mistakenly pull words from a neighboring column or ad and attach them to the wrong article. This creates “phantom” names: people who appear in a story but who were never […]

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 […]

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 […]