Hello my genealogical friends! I hope this blog post is finding you well. I know that you may have come expecting another post with more general research tips, but I have decided to take a step back from that topic and focus once more on highlighting some source types that you may be overlooking on your quest to build a narrative of your ancestor’s life. I would like to draw your attention specifically towards newspapers. Often as we genealogists are shifting through our sources, we forget how rich newspapers can be with information of our relatives. Instead, we dismiss them as just another source that may confirm the birth, marriage, or death of ancestors, but they can be so much more! Let’s look together at what information we may find in newspapers, and how you can use them to further your family tree!
One of the main reasons you may have gone searching for a newspaper source about your ancestor may be that you would like a second source to corroborate an ancestor’s death date. In that case you may have come across an obituary. You may be ecstatic to find this and file it away quickly with your other source, however I urge to take it back out and read it a few times. Within these few paragraphs you may be able to uncover other interesting facts about your ancestor’s life, including what they liked to do, what groups they may have been a part of etc. All these small facts may provide leads for you to investigate local activities, societies, business, etc. that your ancestor may have been allowing you to uncover not only a secondary source verifying a death date, but also a more complete picture of your ancestor’s life.
Other interesting tidbits you may come across while scouring the newspapers from the area and time your ancestor lived might lead you to town gossip involving them. Remember one of our first rules as genealogists is being open to information we might not like to hear about our families or individual relatives. Gossip you may run across may be crass and involve criminal activities, shameful scandals, or perhaps reveal a missing relative. Although these tidbits may seem so fantastical, they must be true, remember to verify the information through other sources, just as you would with any type of information you gather in your genealogical information search.
Lastly, newspapers could lead you towards other sources of information via institutions in the local area your ancestor lived. Even if an obituary, article, or piece, does not feature a relative, newspapers can be a great place to find the names of local schools, reports of land transactions, businesses, political groups involved in a then current issue, etc. Knowing this information may help you piece together why an ancestor of yours, or family line made the decisions they did. Perhaps a family in your line moved, it could have been due to some of the issues these institutions presented to them. Remember to contextualize the information you find regarding seemingly unrelated local happenings a newspaper reports and the life of your ancestor.
I hope that you have found this blog post helpful, and most of all that you have been reinvigorated to revisit some of the newspaper source you have gathered or gather some if you haven’t already! We live in a day and age where so many old newspapers are accessible via online databases, and I encourage you to go out and look for some right now! Again, if you have more in-depth questions, please check out my longer form video presentations located under the webinars tab of this website. If you still have questions do not hesitate to reach out to my email or phone listed at the top of the website! Good luck as you continue to build your family tree!
Winona Laird The Genealogy Granny
