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. […]
Category: Newspapers
Newspapers
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Newspaper columns were often narrow, forcing long names to be split across two lines. To fit the available space, editors and typesetters inserted hyphens or broke names at the end of a line. While human readers usually recognize the continuation, OCR software may interpret the fragments as separate words, making an otherwise obvious surname difficult—or […]
Not every name variation found in a newspaper was the result of poor printing, bad handwriting, or OCR errors. Sometimes the individual intentionally used a different name. Actors adopted stage names, authors wrote under pen names, soldiers enlisted under assumed identities, and immigrants occasionally reinvented themselves after arriving in a new country. In other cases, […]
A woman’s name in the newspaper often depended on the event being reported rather than her legal identity. Social columns, wedding announcements, legal notices, and community news frequently used different naming conventions, making it easy for the same person to appear under multiple names. Researchers who search only one version of a woman’s name may […]