7 useful tips for discovering stories and details in newspapers that shaped your ancestors lives:

• Search Last Name nationwide, then refine

  If you took your local newspaper and organized all the articles in it by the location of the event being reported, you would find that the majority of the news comes from outside of the city, county or even state where the paper was published. This has been true throughout history. Search for family history information in newspapers as follows:

  1. First, search with just the last name.

  2. Then narrow the search by date range (using advance search feature) if you get too many results.

  3. Once you have searched with this criteria and still getting too many results, narrow further by using the city or state name as a keyword.

  It is important to keep in mind that GenealogyBank’s search engine is very specific. This applies to the names and keywords fields. When searching nationwide for an article from San Francisco, California, there are a variety of keywords you could use: California, Calif, CA, San Francisco, San Fran, SF.

• Pay attention to “Please Copy” notices

  When something noteworthy occurs such as a birth or death, news is first printed locally.

  If that person has ties to other areas, then other newspapers may carry the story. Newspapers may do this either on their own accord, or at the request of the original publisher. What you want to watch out for is a “please copy” notice, which can be a valuable clue that your ancestor had ties to another part of the country where you might find additional articles or records about him or her.

  Here’s just one example of the many “please copy” notices found in the newspaper article below from New Orleans, Louisiana:

  • Jesse Sands, formerly of Pittsburg, and his wife Jessie M. Olmsted, passed away within two days of each other. The end of their death notice says: “Newburg, N.Y. and Pittsburg, Pa. papers please copy.” So for these two ancestors, you want to include New Orleans, Newburg and Pittsburgh in your searches.

  Because these death notices were originally published in a New Orleans newspaper, you want to search that area for more news about your ancestor. But thanks to these “please copy” notices, you are given additional locations for further searching.

  
• Search on name variations

  People are usually known by a variety of monikers, both formal and informal. Keep in mind that this is the rule, rather than the exception, so don’t ever limit searches to just one version of a name. Include titles, nicknames, initials, middle names without first names, and other variations. For example:

  • John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith
  • J. J. Smith or J. J. J. Smith
  • Jacob or Jingleheimer Smith
  • Mr. Smith or simply Smith
  • Thomas Edison or Mr. Edison
  • The Wizard of Menlo Park
  • Mary Stillwell
  • Dot Stillwell (her childhood nickname)
  • Thomas Edison’s first wife
  • Mrs. Edison
  • Mina Edison or Mina Miller
  • Thomas Edison’s second wife
• Search newspapers for events
  Another suggested query is to incorporate the word descendant with a specific event, such as the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. Enclosing the search in quotes, “Mayflower descendant,” produces a different result than if you searched on each term without the quotation marks. The difference is that when you simply input terms without quotes, the search engine will find results whenever the two words are located anywhere within the same article—but if you enclose the terms in quotation marks, the terms have to be next to each other in an article in order to show up on the search results page.
  Note: generally the “s” is ignored, along with capitalization, so don’t worry about entering “Mayflower descendants” or “mayflower descendant”; either will suffice.
• Social notices provide many clues
  Many newspapers carried social notices, reporting the comings and goings of many friends and relatives. These social columns in newspapers provide wonderful research clues to track your ancestor’s activities as well as personal relationships.
• Use quotations for phrases
  Whenever you enter a group of words that you want to find together, such as “San Francisco,” put the group in quotation marks.
• Use keywords and exclude keywords

  Use Keywords: You can add a series of keywords into the “Include Keywords” box. Keep in mind that adding too many keywords all at once may not be an effective research strategy. Add them one at a time until you get down to a reasonable number of results to search, around 100-200.

  Exclude Keywords: You can also use the “Exclude Keywords” box to narrow results. Let’s say you were searching for a man named Eric Clapton, but you weren’t looking for the musician. Glance through the results and find words that often appear in articles about the musician. These may be things like: album, concert, or guitar. Enter those words into the “Exclude Keywords” box as follows: album OR concert OR guitar. This eliminates articles with those words.