Windfall!

 

When I first started into genealogy, I mostly traced my family through census records which was fairly easy in most cases to do. Soon I had the basic family tree sketched in through many generations but it fell like a fairly hollow victory. I know their names, birth, marriage and death dates but I really don't know THEM personally. They were just names on a computer screen.

So I set out trying to "flesh" out my ancestors by learning more about THEM personally and one of the best ways to do that is to read things they wrote. Very few things of that nature survive but fortunately there are a lot more things written about them that survive in the form of newspapers. I have founds many hundreds if not thousands of articles on various ancestors and I now feel like I know many of them in such a deeper manner that should we meet on the street, I would be able to have a pretty good conversation with them. But I still have a big problem, or hole to be exact.

Five generations of one side of my family pretty much grew up, lived and died in the same area and it had no newspapers that could be found online and searched through. It was a problem/blind spot that encompassed nearly 25% of my family tree. Eight years ago, I decided to start to figure out what was behind the blind spot so I made a trip down to the genealogy library of that county in the basement of a former elementary school and had a look around. 

Among other things, they had racks full of leather bound copies of several local newspapers that I could look up nearly anything I desired if I just had a name of the newspaper and the date the article was published. They even had a row of scrapbooks along one wall in which any obituary posted in one of the local papers was clipped and saved in chronological order and if I had a date, I could look it up. I hadn't brought any of those things. I went home and as part of my goal to write up research notes for every ancestor, I compiled a list of dates of important milestone events like births, weddings and deaths. Time got away from me and it would be six years later before I went down again last winter in the weeks before Christmas, this time with a list of death dates. I wrote about that trip here. It has been moved to the first floor of the former school building.

During that trip, besides dozens of obituaries, I learned they had all the newspapers now digitized but they weren't online. They were just on their computer hard drive arranged in groupings of a year. To search them, I could just type in a keyword, select a year and it would find every newspaper in which my search word or phrase was found. I had asked them about if they would ever consider putting all those digitized files online but at the time they said they had decided not to in hopes that more people would come to the genealogy center. They admitted it hadn't panned out that way. 

I pondered my course of action this spring, summer and fall, unsure of how to proceed. Searching by single year over the course of ones life can be a time consuming task and I literally had 50 or so immediate ancestors in my family tree to do. Not to mention there would be searches for different combinations of first name and surname, including nicknames, middle names, middle initials, etc. I decided to just pick a few names to start with and to also buy a big thumb drive. My hope was that I could go down there and ask if it was okay to copy all those files for my own personal use back home since it would take years to methodically search all of them. I even had thoughts of surreptitiously make a copy of them but wasn't sure if I could actually do something like that.

Today was that day and after I arrived after making an appointment, I told the nice lady that I wanted to search their local newspapers using their computer. She sat down at the desk and pulled it up on the screen and immediately I noticed something was different. She just selected an url address. We had a back and forth and I quickly learned that a few weeks ago, they had just completed a project and they were all now online. They had all five or six local papers online and all issues over all years were searchable at one time if so desired! I wanted to turn right around and go back home to start my search from the comfort of my own desk but I didn't want to be rude so I spent about 90 minutes looking up one pair of ancestors whom I have no newspaper articles on and soon had located 30 or more articles. I passed up on reading maybe three dozen others simply because the dates indicated they weren't during a time period I was interested in. But I do plan to go back and revisit them soon.

I now have 48 more ancestors on my list to search for articles upon and I'm fairly certain I will find out lots of interesting information in the coming months and years. Needless to say, I'm stoked at the possibility!