Introducing the Research Guide Bundle. Get all Newspaper Research Academy Research Guides – Forever.
The normal subscription includes all Research Guides + all On-Demand Webinars + a no-ad experience whenever you use The Ancestor Hunt website. It is an annual subscription, and you can renew it every year to get the added materials.
Why Purchase the Research Guide Bundle?
- It is a one-time PERENNIAL purchase. As long as you keep the Google Drive Link where all the Research Guides are stored, you get all of them FOREVER. If I add 50 more Research Guides in the next two years, you will receive ALL of them. There are NO RENEWALS.
- It is less expensive than the complete Newspaper Research Academy subscription.
- If you are familiar with the Quicksheets that I have published over the last 5 years, the Research Guides are similar in form, but they have much more detail and contain a significant amount of information. They generally range from 2 to 26 pages in length.
- Access is easy. After your purchase, I receive an email. I will then email you the link to Google Drive, where the Research Guide folder is stored. You can read and download the PDF whenever you want. Just save the emailed Google Drive link, and you will have access to all the Research Guides that I add – forever.
Below is a list with descriptions of all the Research Guides. Purchase instructions follow the list.
Obits are important because their content is so valuable to genealogists. They contain a mini-family tree of the person, in addition to information about what the deceased accomplished in their life. This Research Guide presents several techniques to find obituaries in newspaper databases, indexes, clipping scrapbooks, and other types of collections.
This Research Guide presents 40 distinct online techniques that will significantly enhance your ability to find more newspaper articles. There are Searching and Browsing basics, and Tools, Techniques, and Tips.
Using nicknames as well as formal given names will produce a considerable percentage of added research results. This Research Guide provides over 1,000 nicknames and their corresponding formal given names in 13 languages.
In newspapers, you are likely to find abbreviations of given or first names, as well as other types of words, including titles and geographical terms. Abbreviations were heavily used in old newspapers to save space. It is the best technique to boost the number of pertinent search results. In this Research Guide, you will find over 1,500 abbreviations in 13 languages.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) does its best to convert minute black dots in generally poor quality old newspapers to letters and words. One can overcome this by deliberately misspelling words. This is done by swapping letters in the OCR’s index for letters of similar shapes in your search criteria. This Research Guide provides a list of over 100 letter pairs.
This Research Guide presents all the details that you should capture in a log as you are searching online. There is a downloadable PDF and an Excel spreadsheet with detailed descriptions of the fields that you can use.
If you are searching newspapers before 1963, and your search criteria includes a U.S. state, you need to use “old” abbreviations rather than the current two-digit code. This Research Guide presents the old abbreviations for each state..
Just searching for surnames or full names will not find as many articles that are available. You need to conduct what I call “Combination Searches”. Consider including a property or legal term with the surname to achieve more results. This Research Guide presents 160 property and legal terms (e.g., deed, probate, etc.) to include in the search.
Hyphenated words were primarily used to save space by inserting a hyphen at the end of a line. They were also used frequently for words like “mother-in-law”. Fortunately, the “in-word” hyphens have mostly disappeared over time. Both styles of hyphen use exist in old newspapers – a lot. We need to be aware of this and customize our searches to consider hyphens. This Research Guide presents some pointers regarding using hyphenated words in your searches.
Are you trying to find an obituary for an ancestor and having difficulty? Try using an obituary word (e.g., beloved, loving, funeral, etc.) with the surname to direct the search results to an obituary. This Research Guide presents 90 “obituary words” to use in your search criteria.
To succeed at newspaper research, you must search in the right location, and you must search in the appropriate date range. You must know where to find the titles to match the correct locations and date ranges. This is true in searching both free databases and subscription databases. This Research Guide will provide the URLs for 20 of the largest newspaper databases available in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and the UK.
The “news of the day,” in which articles are published discussing the latest events in the geographical area that the newspaper title covers, is what people think most about when discussing what is in a newspaper. Of course, those articles are extremely useful to any researcher. However, there is so much more in a typical newspaper. This Research Guide discusses over 50 different types of articles that are extremely important.
The capabilities of newspaper database software, independent of the size and quality of their scanned collections, break down into two parts: How do you search the site and find “stuff”; and, how do you download and save the articles that you find? This Research Guide is all about the second part – how do you download and save articles, so that you capture the article in the proper format, and capture the source citation.
This Research Guide discusses the different characteristics you should consider when choosing to purchase a paid newspaper database subscription. It’s not all about how much it costs.
The Vitals section of the newspaper is the most pursued by genealogy newspaper researchers, primarily because that is where death notices and obituaries reside. But there are more than just obits in this important section. This Research Guide discusses the keys to getting the most for your family history research out of the Vitals Section and how to analyze the content of the articles that you find.
Finding information and articles in newspapers about your ancestors is incredibly rewarding. And the amount of information about your ancestors in old newspapers is likely more than we can ever find. If you are not careful, you can make assumptions about what is in ink on the newsprint and foul up your research because of poor conclusions. This Research Guide discusses the traps that you can fall into.
Not all digitized newspapers are free. Many are behind a paywall, i.e., they require a subscription. But, there are ways to either reduce the cost or even eliminate it. This Research Guide discusses ways to save money on your subscriptions.
Another rewarding strategy in newspaper research has to do with immigrant ancestors’ surnames. Errors by clerks, census takers, or newspaper typesetters are incredibly common. This Research Guide includes a list of 100 common surnames, primarily of European origin, and their likely English equivalents that you might encounter in old newspapers due to phonetic spelling, anglicization, or misinterpretation.
Just searching for surnames or full names will not find as many articles that are available. You need to conduct what I call “Combination Searches”. Consider including a life event term (e.g., birth, marriage, etc.) with the surname to achieve more results. This Research Guide includes 200 Life Event terms to include in the search.
Just searching for surnames or full names will not find as many articles that are available. You need to conduct what I call “Combination Searches”. Consider including a business or occupational term with the surname to achieve more results. This Research Guide includes 50 Business and Occupational terms to include in the search.
Online newspapers are generally categorized by geography, e.g., country, state, city, province, etc. But not all published newspapers are organized that way. What about student newspapers, farming, religious, and foreign language newspapers? There are also very specialized newspapers, like Japanese Internment Camp newspapers and CCC newspapers. This Research Guide presents links to all these types of newspapers that have been curated by The Ancestor Hunt.
Are you trying combination searches (Name plus occupation) and having difficulty? Like a lot of words, in the “old days,” there were different names for occupations in the U.S. and the U.K. In this Research Guide, you will find 350 names of occupations and their meanings.
Are you searching in the Community or Local News for interesting tidbits about local residents? Often, if they are down with an illness or hospitalized, their illness might be published. Having difficulty? You might consider that in old newspapers in the U.S. and the UK, illnesses had different names in the “old days”. In this Research Guide, you will find 150 names of illnesses and their meanings and/or modern equivalents.
HathiTrust is well known for it's outstanding book collection. There are newspapers and journals as well. HathiTrust provides a full-text search function. This Guide shows how to use the full-text search capability.
The Internet Archive has a massive amount of digitized newspapers. This Guide shows you how to perform full-text searches.
Google Books is well known for it's outstanding book collection. There are newspapers as well. This Guide shows how to use the full-text search capability to search newspapers. The old Google News Archive has not been adding new titles since 2011, and its search capability is dicey. But all of the Google News Archive content can be searched with the full-test search capabilities of Google Books.
What is Proximity Search? It is quite simple. It asks the search engine to search for occurrences where Word1 is within X words of Word2, where X is a number. This Research Guide provides a detailed explanation of proximity searches and discusses the various nomenclatures used to facilitate their use in newspaper research software.
There are lots of things to consider when researching historical newspapers online. It starts with which online database you choose to search, to how you download and store article clippings, as well as what you do with searches where you don’t find anything. This Guide provides some insight into what you should do and what you shouldn’t do.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) are powerful tools for online newspaper research. They allow you to control how search engines or databases interpret the relationship between your keywords. This Guide shows you how to optimize your search criteria using Boolean operators.
Wildcards (* and ?) are powerful tools to account for spelling variations, misspellings, or uncertain characters in names or keywords. This guide shows you how to use wildcard searches to obtain more results.
Newspaper articles can be found in libraries and genealogical society collections that do not reside in a historical newspaper database. These instututions have created newspapetr indexes, clipping files and scrapbooks, transcriptions that have been uploaded to websites, and abstracts. This Guide discusses each one.
Researchers of online newspapers often get hung up on searching for names only, possibly combined with an occupation, a club or lodge, a church, or a business, just to name a few. Yet there is something that every person had – a residence or a place of work. And these had something in common – an address. Thus, searching for an address or a street name can provide many more articles than one might imagine.
By carefully reviewing advertisements and classified sections, you may uncover valuable details such as full names, dates, family connections, locations, occupations, and personal anecdotes that contribute to building a more comprehensive family tree.
The amount of information in newspaper Legal Notices is phenomenal. It requires careful analysis to extract genealogy clues. These public announcements are mandated by law to ensure transparency in legal and government affairs. A wide variety of notices can be found in this section, often providing crucial clues for researchers. This Guide discusses the type of legal information that can be found and the genealogy data that can be extracted.
Society and community pages may once have been considered “light reading,” but to genealogists they are a goldmine of human detail. They transform dry facts into living stories, connecting names, places, and events into narratives that illuminate both individual ancestors and the communities in which they lived. This Guide presents the types of articles in these newspaper sections, and the genealogy information that can be obtained from these pages.
When one thinks of what types of school-related articles are in old newspapers, graduation lists and sports-related articles typically come to mind. But there is so much more. This Research Guide presents all the different types of newspaper articles about Schools and Students.
Crimes committed in the community are a popular type of article that gets newspaper readers’ attention. There are much more court-related articles in old newspapers that provide genealogy information, as well as content that can contribute to ancestor stories. This Research Guide discusses these types of newspaper articles and the genealogy information that can be extracted from the articles.
A category of newspaper articles that contains a significant amount of genealogical value are articles about business and commerce. There generally was a Business section in many old newspapers, yet these types of articles also tended to appear throughout the entire paper. This Guide discusses the various types of articles about business and commerce, and the genealogy information that can be found in these articles.
Accidents, fires, floods and many other events happened almost every day, and the local newspaper was the media organization that published the story. Unfortunately, almost every family suffered through these events once or more in their lives. Sometimes the results were minor, but more than likely, they were devastating and had a lasting effect on a person or their family. This Research Guide discusses the various types of disasters and accident articles, and the genealogy information that can be obtained from these articles.
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After your purchase, I receive an email. I will then email you the link to Google Drive, where the Research Guide folder is stored. You can read and download the PDF whenever you want.