Family History Tips-Part 23

Newspapers.com, Digital Archive Brings Life to the Past

by Brenna Corbit, Technical Services Librarian

Genealogical data gleaned from baptismal records and death certificates or historical events in text-books present interesting facts, but that’s it. One thing missing is that we may often forget that these events surrounded real living people like you and me. That is where The Yocum Library’s newest database Newspapers.com comes into play.

Microfilmed newspapers of the past were useful for looking up information of which we had a date, such as an obituary. But to find articles about family scandals, tragedies or notable deeds, one would have to read months of papers hoping to find anything if a reasonable time frame was unknown. Likewise, looking for articles such as how World War One affected local communities would require much reading. Digital imaging and OCR (optical character recognition) changed all that.

OCR is a computerized method of reading images of text in digitized images much like our eyes scan a page and interpret printed words, only OCR scans millions of pages for keyword queries in seconds. To show the value of this technology, I present two examples.

I never knew the details of why my great grandfather was divorced from his first wife on 7 November 1885. The article that appeared months before the date presents the story that led to that event. 

In terms of historical research, I present a portion of an article of how Reading citizens celebrated their first war-time Christmas during WWI.

To find Newspapers.com go to The Yocum Library database listing under A to Z or History. The off campus link is available on the user ID/password sheet found in the RACC Portal under the resources tab. Once you are on the homepage, I highly recommend the two short video tutorials to effectively use the database.

To restate what I said in past articles about OCR, it is not perfect, but it is always improving. The good news is if you know a time frame or exact date and OCR fails to find your information, Newspaper.com’s digital images of individual newspapers are borrowable by date. Remember, you can stop by the library anytime if you need help researching. Thank you.