Category: Newspapers

Millions of immigrants arrived with names that were unfamiliar to English-speaking editors, clerks, and readers. Rather than preserving the original spelling, newspapers often translated, shortened, simplified, or anglicized names into forms that seemed more familiar to the local community. As a result, the same person may appear under several different versions of their name depending […]

Newspapers were created in a fast-moving environment where information often passed through several hands before reaching print. A reporter might hear a name incorrectly, jot it down hastily in a notebook, and later hand the notes to a typesetter who had never met the person involved. The result was often a perfectly understandable—but incorrect—version of […]

Newspapers were written for local readers who already understood the language, accents, and speech patterns of their community. Reporters often recorded names the way they sounded rather than how they were formally spelled. As families moved from one region to another, accents and pronunciation differences could dramatically change how a surname appeared in print, creating […]

Newspapers were expensive to print, and every column inch mattered. To save space, editors, clerks, and typesetters routinely abbreviated common given names, titles, organizations, and locations. These shortened forms were widely understood by contemporary readers, but they can create unexpected obstacles for modern researchers who search only for complete names. Distortion Type Abbreviations and Initials […]

Over 900 New titles were added by various Free and Subscription databases in the last month. Here are links to all the updates:

GenealogyBank, a subscription newspaper site, has announced its updates for June 2026. There are 225 New Titles and 13 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 […]

One of the most common distortions in modern newspaper research never appeared in the original newspaper at all. It was created during digitization. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software attempts to convert scanned newspaper images into searchable text, but historic fonts, faded ink, damaged pages, and unusual typefaces often confuse the software. Characters that look similar […]

Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections regularly adds or updates newspaper titles to the collections. Last month, 10 titles were added or updated (Information provided by Veridian Software, which powers the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections website). Here is the list of titles for this month: To access the site, go to Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections

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 […]