Ancestry.com today is doubling the size of its Historical Newspaper Collection, adding (so they tell me) a billion names and over 20 million images. And they're offering free access from June 12 to June 19. Sounds to me like a great, cheap Father's Day gift.
The Library of Congress blog reports today that the news business hasn't changed all that much in 100 years.
I had been expecting some weighty discourse on, I don’t know, maybe industrialism or American’s nascent role as a world power.For more curious news from a century ago, subscribe to 100 Years Ago Today.
Instead what I got was this: William Howard Taft, the secretary of war who would go on to win the presidency the following year, is “not so large as rumored.”
The Library of Congress's Chronicling America project finally came online this afternoon. As I mentioned back in January, this phase offers digitized newspapers published between 1900 and 1910 in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. They also have an excellent directory of American newspapers published since 1690, with info on repositories where copies may be found.
Rob Kyff of the Hartford Courant notices an error often committed by his colleagues:
Can someone please tell me why so many writers are confusing the words "ancestor" and "descendant"?
A recent newspaper caption under a color photo of a mother and son read, "Karen Duplessis and her son, Patrick, are Patrick Henry's ancestors." Now if this stylish mom and curly haired kid in a red polo shirt are ancestors of Patrick Henry, I know a lot less about pre-1700 fashion and the history of photography than I thought I did. [Link]
Keep an eye on this URL in February. The Library of Congress is set to launch the "General-access Phase 1 prototype" of American Chronicle—"a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922."
You can already sample the California and Utah offerings. Here also are links to the Florida, Kentucky, New York, and Virginia project pages, and to a list of the DC papers to be included.The digital collection will begin with 118,000 pages from newspapers published between 1900 and 1910 in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Over time newspapers published between the 1830s and 1922 will be added from all states and territories. Also "American Chronicle" will offer a Newspaper Directory of records for more than 125,000 newspaper titles published between 1690 and the present, along with library holdings information, acquired from OCLC WorldCat, with links to digitized page content when available. For more see http://www.loc.gov/ndnp. [Link]
I've just learned from The Internet Guy that the New Brunswick Provincial Archives has added Daniel F. Johnson's New Brunswick Newspaper Vital Statistics to its website.
As someone who has thumbed through the 102 volumes of this collection at the Maine State Library, I know what a huge boon this will be to genealogists with roots in the Maritimes. What's most remarkable about the collection—aside from the fact that the compiler is, like me, a native of Maine—is that it was mostly a one-man project.
Danny worked persistently and comprehensively mining all English-language New Brunswick newspapers available in original form or on microfilm. He copied out notices of births, marriages, deaths, and also of ship wrecks, trips outside the province and many other events, all containing names that would further the search for an ancestor. The work is remarkably accurate although as Danny was not a strict proof reader, preferring to use his time to push ahead with indexing and transcribing, occasional typographical errors crept in. Danny sold many copies of the Vital Statistics volumes to libraries, historical societies and individuals over the years and maintained a list of on-going subscribers.
Danny kept the extracted information in a database to which he later added a search capability enabling him to provide a service to researchers who did not have access to the published volumes. In celebration of the first 100 volumes of Vital Statistics, he produced a CD index of the entire series. It is hard to convey what a monumental undertaking the vital statistics project was and what a unique and invaluable benefit it is to research. [Link]
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902) is arguably the most genealogically valuable historical newspaper freely available on the Web. 147,000 pages were digitized five years ago with a $239,000 grant, and every month they draw about 45,000 visitors staying 15 minutes or longer.
Still, the Eagle Online is wanting in one respect:
Problem is that it covers only the period from 1841-1902. All the remaining pages of the Brooklyn Eagle up to 1955, when it folded, remain in yellowed clip morgues and on clunky microfilm. As Brooklyn grew, so did the circulation and the page count of a daily copy of the Brooklyn Eagle. Therefore, the price tag to digitize the second half of this treasure is about a million bucks. [Link]Present circumstances prevent me from footing the bill on my own, but I know that most of my readers are extremely wealthy, and that some have a passing interest in genealogy. Therefore, I would ask them to click over to the Eagle support page and donate a few thousand to the cause. For every dollar you donate, I pledge to spend a moment sincerely considering making a donation myself.
