The following article has been adapted and updated from a presentation given at the IAJGS conference in New York City in August 2006— Ed.

Jewish genealogists tracking ancestors who emigrated to the United States generally are amazed to discover how often news about these individuals— from the moment they landed at Castle Garden, Ellis Island, Galveston, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia or San Francisco— appeared in so many newspapers and periodicals—and not just small town, regional or Jewish community newspapers, but newspapers of record for major U.S. cities: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution, Hartford Courant among others. Researchers whose ancestors resided in Great Britain will discover a similar phenomenon in The Times of London, The British Library Online Newspaper Archive, The London Gazette and The Jewish Chronicle.

Just when many researchers thought they reached the end of the line in their ability to put “flesh on the bones” of their ancestors, the advent of digitized newspapers has

Just when many researchers thought they reached the end of the line in their ability to put “flesh on the bones” of their ancestors, the advent of digitized newspapers has opened an exciting new avenue of research.

open­ed an exciting new avenue of research. With one keystroke, genealogists can move light-years beyond statistics, surnames and place names to discover details about people who loved, fought, married, divorced, made business deals, suffered tragedies, founded synagogues, sued each other, left wills, had their apartments burn down, dabbled in bigamy, led strikes, picketed employers—the gamut of human existence—with the details recorded as they happened.

The extraordinary search capabilities of online databases makes newspaper research easier than ever before and their numbers are growing. One of the first databases on the genealogical scene was ProQuest Historical Newspapers, designed to be the definitive digital archive of leading newspapers in North America. (See sidebar [p. 26] for newspapers made available by ProQuest Historical Newspapers.)

In PDF form, the ProQuest database offers full-text and full-image articles for these papers dating back to their first issue—digital reproductions of every page from every issue, cover to cover. With a user-friendly interface, researchers can use keyword, subject, author, article title and journal title to search for information. Unfortunately, the database has no Soundex option, so a researcher must be creative with spelling variations, also taking into account that occasionally typeface misreads occur—the letter b is mistaken for an h for example—because the optical character recognition system is not infallible. Name reversals—using last names first for obituary searches, e.g.: “Oberlander, Samuel,” also should be tried.

When you find yourself at a dead-end in your research, a quick look in these newspaper archives might divulge the fact, clue or hint you seek. From obituaries, birth, engagement and marriage announcements, to curiosities such as “Yesterday’s Fires,” “News of the Courts” and articles covering Eastern European towns and businesses, researchers will be astonished by the unexpected appearances your 19th- and 20th-century immigrant ancestors made in the pages of these tabloids and broadsheets. Along with reports of key historical events, one can find smaller, though no less important, items in newspapers: vital statistics (records of births, marriages and deaths which function as substitutes for missing civil or religious registrations); biographical sketches; legal notices; public announcements; advertisements; immigration, migration and shipping information. History captured as it happened, a snapshot of a moment in time when ancestors were there; the emotional pace of an era; the gossip; the “smell” of the streets; what passed for a scandal; the bankruptcies; social, synagogue, and club news; marriages, engagements, bar mitzvahs, death notices and obituaries–it’s all there.

Another excellent digital resource is newspaperarchive.com from Newsbank, the largest newspaper database available online, covering more than 1,300 regional newspaper titles with more recent coverage, along with historical databases for the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News Historical Archive (1885–1977), The Philadelphia Inquirer (1860–1918), San Jose, California, Mercury (1884–1914) and the Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer (1804–38). NewsBank’s group of recent regional and older historical newspapers can be accessed through Ancestry.com, the Godfrey Library and a relatively new genealogy subscription service called Genealogy Bank. For New York City researchers, the digitized Brooklyn Daily Eagle offers a free online database covering the years 1841–1902. Google also recently has added a news search option with links to archived news articles throughout the U.S.

Although these resources are available free of charge at most public libraries and universities, many libraries also offer free remote access to cardholders, as do the paid subscription services listed above. From the comfort of one’s own home, 24-hours a day, genealogists can find answers to long-standing family riddles, vexing questions, rumors and conundrums.

Many a mystery has been solved by the discovery of death notices and their more elegant cousin, obituaries, which are a trove of useful information, trumping simple death records any day. These gems usually provide the age of deceased; year of birth; cause of death; location; circumstances; funeral arrangements; cemetery information; synagogue membership; rabbi’s name; maiden names and married names of female relatives, pallbearers, friends and relatives; cities where children, brothers and sisters of deceased are living; occupation of deceased; business addresses; personal attributes; landsmanschaft (society of townsmen) and fraternal organization membership; accomplishments; military records; and the deceased’s relationship to other towns or cities, as in “Boston Papers Please Copy,” or even deaths that occurred out of town.

Also, remember that people sometimes fell ill and died while traveling. Genealogists who have failed to find a death record in the town where a relative resided should check out-of-town newspapers where other family members were known to have lived.

Information provided in a 1927 death notice from the Arkansas Gazette for my great-grandfather’s brother, who died in Little Rock, led me to more than 40 extended family members:

Mr. Besser seemed in good health yesterday morning and had not complained of feeling badly, according to his family. He is survived by his wife; two sons, Ben Besser of Philadelphia and Jack Besser of Chicago; three daughters, Ms. Rosie Hickey of Memphis, Mrs. Fannie Ebner of Astoria, Oregon, and Miss Gertrude Besser of Little Rock;. four brothers, Lippman and Joe Besser of Little Rock and Isadore and Morris Besser of St. Louis

In a few lines, I learned Mr. Besser’s brothers’ names and where they lived and the married names of female relatives and where they had relocated after marriage, research that, if done by traditional vital and census records searches, would have taken much longer. Marriage licenses listed in the Los Angeles Times conveniently provided the ages and country of origin of brides and grooms. Lists of naturalization petitions also were regularly listed in this publication.

A member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles had a family story that had been handed down about her grandfather as a young man. Did he really murder a pro-Nazi leader at a meeting in Chicago in the 1930s? A 30-second search for the surname of Ragins and the keyword “Nazi” yielded two stories about two hot-headed Jewish youths, Aaron Ragins (the grandfather in question), and Julius Rosenthal, both members of a “nameless organization” of about 1,000 young Jewish men, who, vigilante-style, tracked the meetings of the pro-Nazi Silver Shirt Legion of America that operated in the Chicago area in the 1930s. Luckily, Mr. Ragins had only injured, not murdered, the leader. The article, complete with a photograph of the bandaged, wounded victim, was an exciting find.

Did relatives own a boarding house? An address search might bring up that information, with names and phrases such as “first-class Jewish table” or “refined Jewish boarding house.” Searching unclaimed bank deposits columns can yield many “unclaimed relatives!” Searching under wills might provide details on missing family members.

Stories involving events, people and communities overseas often were published in U.S. newspapers, including those about shtetl life. A search on Drohobycz brought up many articles about the oil industry there, including one from 1939 about the capture of their principal oil well with the headline: “Drohobycz Taken Over, But Nazis Still Look for Soviet Aid.”

A little-known resource for researching relatives who moved from New York’s Lower East Side to communities throughout the United States are Jewish periodicals and journals, such as The Jewish Ledger from New Orleans, Chicago’s The Sentinel and The Sabbath Visitor of Cincinnati. Usually unindexed, many of these periodicals are written in English, while others are available only in Yiddish or Hebrew. A few Jewish periodicals from the Greater New York area include Jeshurun and the incredible Jewish Daily Forward, which appeared on the streets of New York in April 1897, written entirely in Yiddish. One of its best-known features, Bintel Brief, was one of America’s earliest advice columns, which also functioned as a “looking for my relative” column.

How to Learn About U.S. Regional Newspapers

Available Online or in Libraries on Microfilm

Genealogists can access these excellent newspaper resources from one’s home computer or by visiting local libraries. Although ProQuest no longer offers remote, in-home access to members of genealogical and historical societies, it is available at most major public and university libraries. The Godfrey Library no longer offers ProQuest access, but it does offer NewsBank database and “America’s Obituaries and Death Notices,” a comprehensive collection of newspaper obituaries and death notices from around the United States. Each obituary or death notice is indexed by the name of the deceased and the text of each notice.

For regional and small town newspapers, use Google to search on a town or newspaper to see what access is offered and for what years. Typical entries might be “Massachusetts Newspaper Database” or “Little Rock Newspaper.” Many small-town newspapers still in publication have begun to index back issues.

Finding Historical Newspapers

Not Scanned or Digitized

Over the next 20 years, the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)—a partnership between the NEH and the U.S. Library of Congress—will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet. Until the completion of this project, however, many historical regional newspapers remain undigitized and one must go to the microfilm. This also is true of regional European and United Kingdom newspapers. Check your local library or university first; most big public libraries have excellent microfilm collections of out-of-state (and perhaps some overseas) newspapers. Ones they don’t have can usually be ordered through interlibrary loan. In Los Angeles, the UCLA library is open to the public; I found historical issues of the English Manchester Guardian there, along with scores of U.S. newspapers. The lack of indexes means that a researcher must know the approximate date an event occurred to make searching productive, but one soon falls into the rhythm of knowing on what pages to find the obituaries, births and marriages, and that speeds up the process

Check with out-of-town libraries to identify the publications in its collection. Films usually may be borrowed on interlibrary loan. Often a volunteer, with an interest in a particular era, did some limited indexing (of obituaries, for example) and donated it to the library. Other libraries have genealogical societies working on similar projects. Telephone local libraries to determine if they have a genealogy specialist. Ask if the library will research newspaper microfilms and copy articles; most will for a small fee.

Some newspaper publishers have morgues of back issues; contact the publisher to see if one can peruse them. Check public or academic libraries and genealogical or historical societies in localities of interest, as well as libraries and archives in state capitols. The U.S. Library of Congress has large collections of newspapers, as does the periodical room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. A Google service (news.google.com) permits a search of more than 4,000 publications for current and historical stories. Some of these selections provide links that allow readers to download the entire article at no cost; others charge a small fee, although a snippet usually is provided without charge so that one can judge content.

Access Through Paid Services

Because of overlap between all the subscription services listed below, evaluate which best suits overall research needs. Many libraries offer similar databases free of charge.

• Godfrey Memorial Library. $35 per year (www. Godfrey.org) offers The Times of London digital archive, and many recent regional and historical newspapers, through NewsBank and America’s Obituary Collection, but not ProQuest.
• New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. $60 per year (www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org) offers access to the New York Times ProQuest only through May of 2007, but it offers access to Early American Newspapers, Series I, part of the Readex Digital Collection from NewsBank, Inc. The series includes fully searchable images of newspapers published in the American colonies and United States from 1690 to 1876.
• Ancestry.Com, $155 per year, (www.ancestry.com) but free at most public libraries, offers more than 16 million pages from more than a thousand different newspapers across the U.S., U.K. and Canada dating back to the 1700s—extremely useful for researching smaller towns throughout the U.S. The obituary collection includes more than nine million obituaries, including those in ProQuest’s New York Times. Its historical newspaper collection at www.ancestry.com/landing/historicnewspapers/newstoyou.htm has images of entire newspapers from the western frontier; the Midwest at the turn of the 20th century; New York Times; and Newspaper Archive Elite, a collection compiled from a variety of U.S. newspapers dating from 1851 through 1923.
• America’s GenealogyBank and GenealogyBank.com (www.newsbank.com/genealogists/index.cfm) offers free digital facsimiles of more than 500,000 issues of over 1,300 newspaper titles and a wide variety of other government and civilian documents published in all 50 present states. In addition, NewsBank offers two historical newspaper collections, the Chicago Tribune Historical Archive and the Dallas Morning News Historical Archive, which cover these metropolitan areas from the 1800s to modern times. A search will tell that possible matches were found, and a tiny “thumbnail” image of the original document will be displayed. To view the full document, one must purchase a subscription for either $19.95 per month or $79 for the year.
• Times Select: Subscribers to home delivery of the New York Times can register for free access to TimesSelect, which provides exclusive access to The Times Archive. www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/hd/index.html

New York City Newspapers Online and on Microfilm

• The Brooklyn Daily Eagle free digital version (1841–1902) may be viewed at http://brooklynpubliclibrary. org/eagle. The remainder of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1903–55, 1960–63) is available on microfilm in the Periodicals Room at the Central Library in Brooklyn.
• Obtuaries: www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/News paper/index.html provides links to death notices and obituaries in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Long Island newspapers (older Long Island newspapers also covered Brooklyn and Queens).
• Brooklyn Newspapers: www.rootsweb.com/~ny nassa2/linewspaper.html, offers a list of names of Brook­lyn and other New York-area newspapers .
• New York State newspapers on microfilm at the New York State Library are found at www.nysl.nysed. gov/nysnp/city1.htm. Click on a city.

Jewish Periodicals and Journals

Hebrew Union College in its three locations has an extensive collection of periodicals on microfilm in both English and Hebrew from cities and towns throughout the United States. Call to check their list of publications and cities and ask the language of the publication. These publications have not been indexed and are not available online; researchers must visit one of the locations listed below to use them.

• Klau Library HUC-JIR, One West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012, (212) 674-5300. www.huc.edu/ libraries/ newyork/ index.html.
• Klau Library, 3101 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45220, (513) 221-1875. www.huc.edu/libraries/cincy/ index.html
• Frances-Henry Library, 3077 University Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90007, (213) 749-3424. www.huc.edu/libraries/ losangeles.

Other U.S. Newspaper Resources

Other newspaper digitizing projects are occurring throughout the United States, often sponsored by historical societies or libraries. A Google search using keywords will provide additional information to what’s new or in the works. Here are a few recent additions to the scene:

United Kingdom Research

Don’t forget ancestors in Great Britain. Even relatives who passed through England—or stayed only briefly—on their way to the United States or other countries may have appeared in U.K. papers.

• London Gazette. The online archive (www.gazettes-online.co.uk/archiveSearch.asp?WebType=0&Referer=full) currently covers the 20th-century London Gazette, Edinburgh Gazette and Belfast Gazette. This archives will be further expanded during 2007. Most useful are the naturalization applications and “deed poll” name changes, business lawsuits and death notices (for probate purposes) routinely posted in this paper.
• Times of London. Every issue from 1785–1985 has been scanned and digitized as The Times Digital Archive, available through many university and public libraries throughout the United States and Canada, along with the Godfrey Library paid subscription service. This database contains every page, as published, from the “world’s newspaper of record” and covers all major international historical events from the French Revolution to the Falklands War. Users can search the full text of the entire newspaper, including articles, editorials, birth, death and marriage notices and advertising. If you have relatives who lived in London, this database is a great resource.
• Jewish Chronicle. This online archive (www.thejc. com/archLnk.aspx) allows one to search the pages of the Chronicle from 1841 onwards. Although a search is free—showing only the headline of any article that contains the search terms—only paid subscribers can view the article in its entirety. An additional fee of 5£ is required to download the article, although the screen can be digitally photographed with excellent results. Many lawsuits and court cases from all over Great Britain are mentioned, including child custody cases, fraudulent marriages and bankruptcy hearings.
• British Library Online Newspaper Archive (www.uk. olivesoftware.com) offers limited searching capabilities; good primarily for articles reporting major historical events.

 

Pamela Weisberger is the program chair for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and research coordinator for Gesher Galicia. She holds a masters degree in Broadcasting Communications