{"id":7019,"date":"2014-05-01T15:43:56","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T15:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=7019"},"modified":"2014-05-01T15:43:56","modified_gmt":"2014-05-01T15:43:56","slug":"how-to-research-historical-events-for-genealogy-with-newspapers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/how-to-research-historical-events-for-genealogy-with-newspapers.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Research Historical Events for Genealogy with Newspapers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/strong>: Duncan Kuehn is a professional genealogist with over eight years of client experience. She has worked on several well-known projects, such as \u201cWho Do You Think You Are?\u201d and researching President Barack Obama\u2019s ancestry. In this guest blog post, Duncan shows three real-life examples in which she helped genealogists find newspaper articles about their ancestors, explaining the tips and techniques that got her successful results.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of the best information we find in family history research is news that helps us learn the motivations behind our ancestors\u2019 actions. After all, these family members are so much more than just names and dates on a family tree. Finding out what our ancestors did and the events they were involved in\u2014and their possible motivation\u2014helps us better understand them as real people, not just collections of data.<\/p>\n

The best sources to look for these details of our ancestors\u2019 lives are the journals and letters they wrote. The next best source is old newspapers. They were the Facebook of the day and the gossip rag too. Searching through newspapers using the names of our ancestors can bring back many valuable results. We can also search for news articles about events in our ancestors\u2019 lives that don\u2019t mention our ancestors by name.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve included several examples here of how to find these valuable articles and stories that provide a window into our ancestors\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

The Explosion That Killed Emanuel Urban<\/strong><\/p>\n

A GenealogyBank member was looking for an article about a nitroglycerin explosion that killed her relative Emanuel Urban in September 1904 in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. I ran a search for the name Emanuel Urban but got back no results. She is confident that the date and location of the event are correct, but I couldn\u2019t find any relevant historical newspaper articles. Perhaps the name wasn\u2019t mentioned in the old news articles about the explosion. How can we search on GenealogyBank without using a name?<\/p>\n

Tips for Searching the Newspaper Archives<\/strong><\/p>\n

I ran the search like this:<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

Why did I formulate the newspaper archives search like this? I put nitroglycerin OR nitro-glycerin<\/strong> in the last name field and explosion<\/strong> in the first name field because I wanted the words to appear very close to each other in the news articles. Since I don\u2019t know if the newspaper articles use nitroglycerin or nitro-glycerin, I can search for both using the word OR (both letters capitalized) between them (this is called a \u201cBoolean Operator\u201d).<\/p>\n

Nitroglycerin has a tendency to explode! Without some keywords and a narrow date range, I would get too many search results. To avoid this, I narrowed the results by entering \u201cUpper Sandusky\u201d<\/strong> in the keyword field. Using quotation marks around the name Upper Sandusky will make sure it appears exactly as I typed it.\u00a0 I also added the date range of September 1904 to October 1904 to further narrow the results.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n
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\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n\n\n
Enter Last Name
\n <\/td>\n		<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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\n \n <\/p>\n<\/form>\n

Search News Nationwide<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t do is select just one state\u2019s newspapers to look through. And it is a good thing I searched nationwide. Upper Sandusky is a city in Ohio, but only two of the six search results were published in Ohio newspapers. The others were published in Idaho, Illinois, Michigan and Washington, D.C., newspapers.<\/p>\n

Your Ancestor\u2019s Name Might Have Been Misspelled<\/strong><\/p>\n

Surprisingly, several of the historical news articles mention Emanuel Urban by name. So why didn\u2019t I find his name when I ran the search the first time? Apparently the newspaper editors couldn\u2019t get the spelling of the name correct. I found Emanuel Urban under the following names: Emanuel Urcan, Irban, Urican, Hurcan, and even Samuel Green. Who knows how the name Emanuel Urban became Samuel Green!<\/p>\n

\"Explosion<\/a>
Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield, Illinois), 5 September 1904, page 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

West Virginia Train Robbery<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another GenealogyBank member was searching for articles about an event she had personally been involved in as a young girl in the late 1940s. She was traveling by train with her grandmother when the train was robbed somewhere in West Virginia. She wanted to find some newspaper articles about it so that she could learn more about the event. Her name would not be mentioned in the newspaper articles and she wasn\u2019t sure how to search for information about the incident.<\/p>\n

I ran this search:<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

This search found 35 articles, most of which were about the exact train robbery she remembered! Here is one article that has pictures of some of her fellow passengers:<\/p>\n

\"photos<\/a>
Boston Traveler (Boston, Massachusetts), 10 March 1949, page 27<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Try Using Different Keywords in Your Searches<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course if I entered different keywords into the genealogy search engine, I might be able to find even more old news articles. For example now that I know the date of the train robbery, I could run an archive search like this:<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

This search returned 78 newspaper results! There are certainly more details and stories that could be gathered from these articles.<\/p>\n

\"Passenger<\/a>
Dallas Morning News (Dallas, Texas), 10 March 1949, page 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You will notice that my previous record search used the keywords \u201cWest Virginia\u201d<\/strong> and robbery<\/strong>. The above article has neither term, which is why it did not show up on that first search. It abbreviates West Virginia to W.Va., and uses the term robbed rather than robbery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n\n\n
Enter Last Name
\n <\/td>\n		<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

\n
\n
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\n \n <\/p>\n<\/form>\n

James Nealand & the Gunpowder Mill<\/strong><\/p>\n

A GenealogyBank member was looking for an ancestor named James Nealand who was killed in an explosion at a gunpowder mill in Hazardville, Connecticut, during the Civil War. He knew there were multiple spellings of the name Nealand, but hadn\u2019t been able to find newspaper articles under any of the known spellings. I tried the following search:<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

Search without a Surname<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was able to find six articles relating to the event. I even found James Nealand. His name had been misspelled as James Kneeland.<\/p>\n

\"Explosion<\/a>
Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), 24 July 1862, page 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even if your ancestors weren\u2019t directly involved in any big events, they were affected by the major historical events around them. Researching more about how these important events affected your ancestors\u2019 neighbors and community will help you learn more about the people you are interested in. For example, while researching a small community in South Dakota, I found that the neighbors of the person I was researching had their house destroyed in a devastating tornado. If I had only searched for the people I was directly interested in, I would have missed out on knowing about this tornado that surely affected them too.<\/p>\n

Genealogy Tip:<\/em><\/strong> When searching newspapers to learn more about your ancestors, don\u2019t forget to look for the events they were involved in\u2014or at least affected by\u2014as well. Genealogy is more fun and complete when you learn not just about your ancestors\u2019 individual lives\u2014but also the communities where they resided and the times in which they lived.<\/p>\n

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Introduction: Duncan Kuehn is a professional genealogist with over eight years of client experience. She has worked on several well-known projects, such as \u201cWho Do You Think You Are?\u201d and researching President Barack Obama\u2019s ancestry. In this guest blog post, Duncan shows three real-life examples in which she helped genealogists find newspaper articles about their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12713],"tags":[6889,1102,521,6886,6890,1658,2233,6807,12,6893,6897,6885,465,6888,6895,6896,2020,27,4818,6892,539,1091,6894,6891,6887,1090,3450],"class_list":["post-7019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy-research-tips","tag-accidents","tag-connecticut","tag-ct","tag-emanuel-urban","tag-explosions","tag-family-history-2","tag-family-research","tag-fatal-accidents","tag-genealogy","tag-gunpowder","tag-hazardville","tag-historical-events","tag-historical-newspapers","tag-industrial-accidents","tag-james-nealand","tag-nealand","tag-newspaper-archives","tag-newspapers","tag-newspapers-for-genealogy","tag-nitroglycerin","tag-oh","tag-ohio","tag-train-robberies","tag-upper-sandusky","tag-urban","tag-west-virginia","tag-wv"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}