Collection of News Articles



Always an excellent resource in compiling your family history is the use of local hometown newspaper articles. It can be a short one sentence on a family member visiting friends or an engagement, military service, etc That is it … you never know what might be found.

One individual whose service in the military during World War One I was researching, a short article had a quote by him, saying during a visit to the hometown before being sent overseas, that he “was a Daddy !”. Well, you can imagine my surprise and certainly the town folks back then, since this young man was single, never married.

In the article, he does explain what he meant by that statement. His military unit while training before going overseas had been asked by a charity to help sponsor the care in France for orphans. Each soldier picked a name and photo of the child they would donate part of their military pay for their care. That is what this young man had done for several months and it would continue as long as he was in the military. Unfortunately, the article never provided the child’s name or location in France and also this young soldier was later killed in battle in France. So very unlikely the child will never be known but rather the fine deed this soldier did does speak volumes about this character.

So it does take time and effort. The best method is to concentrate on one ancestor. Keep in mind you do need to try different name spellings. The full name, the first given name and surname, the initials of the two given names and do try just the surname especially if it not a very common name. If they owned a business search that also.

Using the various subscription newspapers (Newspapers.com and Newspaper.archives) in digital form are good as well as the free to use, ‘Chronically America‘ site. You can get Newspapers.com through an ‘Ancestor.com‘ subscription also. There is also ‘Google News Search‘ that is free. Look at ‘Smalltown Papers.com‘ – great for locating those forgotten hometown papers. Also, many libraries have their local newspapers in digital format. Investigate with a Google search for any newspaper of a hometown made digital by nearby universities or state historical societies. There are made methods for finding those ancestor related articles.

By searching just one individual you just might have a full collection in no time. Do keep that digital and even a print copy in a file with that person’s name.

Never be surprised by what you find.

Photos: Newspapers and George Renner Brewing Co. in Ohio.

Related FamilyTree.com Blogs:

Details in a Newspaper Article

Newspapers Online

Pacific Coast Newspapers

< Return To Blog

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.