Ancestry Magazine

Discover the latest Historic Newspapers Online at Ancestry.com.

On the busy streets of cities like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco, the scene was the same. Boys as young as six years, with newspapers tucked under their arms, would call out the headlines of the day to passersby in the hopes of selling a paper.

The boys carried papers that announced the local, national, and international news of the day. Today, with newsboys long relegated to nostalgic images of the past, we can still access the newspapers they sold–in a way made possible only through the Internet.

With the launch of the Ancestry Historical Newspaper Collection in March 2002, subscribers of the newspaper collection are able to conveniently discover the daily events that impacted their ancestors’ lives. This historical and genealogical treasure is brought to Ancestry.com through a partnership with Heritage Microfilm.

In order to provide a broad scope of historical news, Ancestry.com is currently focusing on the first ten years of each state’s most popular newspapers. But as the collection grows, the site will post smaller, local newspapers that date from 1850 to 1923.

How It’s Done
Several steps go into the process of creating newspaper images for online use. Each microfilm image is scanned using a high-quality commercial scanner that produces a high resolution image that is easily read online. Each image is also compressed so it can be downloaded quickly.

The images are then run through special optical character recognition (OCR) software, which was created for the newspaper images by a team of American, Russian, and Chinese software engineers. The OCR software converts the text on the image so each letter and word is recognized individually. The text is recorded in OCR files and identified by placement with x and y coordinates.

Thus, when a researcher searches the collection by keyword, the software searches for a match in the OCR files and brings up the resulting coordinates to the appropriate newspaper pages. Using the coordinates, the software is able to highlight the keyword each time it occurs on the page.

But that isn’t the end of the process. The images are then converted into a format that allows them to be indexed for easy searching.

Options for Viewing the Collection
There are two v iewer tools for the newspaper collection. The basic viewer allows users to view the image and specific areas of a page by using zoom tools to enlarge or reduce the text. There is also a thumbnail image to the right that highlights in yellow the area currently visible in the viewer window. Clicking anywhere on that thumbnail image will reload the viewer window with that portion of the page. Eight directional arrows are also available for moving to different parts of the page.

The advanced viewer requires a free download, but it has greater functionality than the basic viewer and is the recommended choice for Internet Explorer users with high-speed connections. In addition to all of the capabilities of the basic viewer, features of the advanced viewer include real-time panning, magnifying, and selecting as well as an invert option (available by right-clicking on the image).

Both viewers use image enhancement techniques to provide image quality that is as good or better than the original microfilm images. Along with the ease of searching the newspaper collection from home, users can save or print individual pages for future use.

The Value of Historical Newspapers
Through historical newspapers, subscribers can learn about the past and marvel at the stories that add color to our ancestors’ lives. If you know the town in which your ancestor lived, chances are great that you will find him or her mentioned in the local paper.

While some stories had a worldwide impact, most affected only a small town or community. But all stories help us gain insights into the past. Take, for instance, the announcement on 25 December 1921 in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.The Jefferson and Strand movie theater posted a notice that it was increasing its admission fees to keep up with the increased fees of the movie business, and to maintain the quality of its theater. The fees were raised to thirty-five cents for adults and fifteen cents for child ren.

This announcement would not have been important to anyone but the few residents of the community who frequented the Jefferson and Strand movie theater. But today, we can look at the announcement and guess at the economic status of the theater. We can imagine how the news impacted our ancestral families as they adjusted to the price increase. If we are really creative, we can imagine the silent movies and cartoons our ancestors found so entertaining. All of this information helps us create clearer images of our ancestors’ lives.

In addition to the stories that help color our ancestral charts, these old newspapers also provide useful data. They provide secondary source material in the form of obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, anniversary and graduation announcements, legal notices, divorce cases, estate or tax sales, notices of missing persons, news of our ancestors in society sections, and more.

For example, the Reno Evening Gazette has a Brevities section that includes revealing genealogical clues, like this one from September 1887: “A case of small-pox was discovered Sunday at 637 Washington street, and sent to the Twenty-sixth street Hospital, San Francisco. The patient is Carrie Biddlestone, about 20 years of age. She has been residing in the city for only two or three weeks. She has never been vaccinated.”

Whether you’re online looking for interesting news events or searching for genealogical clues, the new Historical Newspaper Collection at Ancestry.com is a great place to turn.

Esther Yu, a contributing editor of Ancestry magazine, is the associate editor of the Ancestry Daily News, an e-mail newsletter that reaches 1.4 million people.