Search Hyphenated Words in Historical Newspapers to Get Up To 30% More Results

Finding your ancestors in newspaper articles is in my opinion – an art, not a science. You must be clever and resourceful to get around the quality limitations in old newspapers

A “feature” of older newspapers is the use of the hyphen. Hyphenated words were often used heavily to save space and due to the limitations of fixed-width type. 

Below is a link to a QuickSheet that contains a description with examples, of the benefits of searching for hyphenated words in your online searching of old newspapers.

To obtain the one-page Quicksheet pdf for easy reference, you can view or download it by clicking on the Download button below:

For all the previously published Quick Reference Guides, click on QuickSheets

Good Luck and Happy Hunting!

One reply on “Search Hyphenated Words in Historical Newspapers to Get Up To 30% More Results”

This is a good reminder. I have adjusted some search practices to OCR output such as creative misspellings, but I haven’t done the partial name search very often.

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