The US Holocaust Memory Museum (USHMM) has teamed up with Ancestry.com to digitize and index the millions of documents from the USHHM’s archives. This partnership is leveraging the indexing software that Ancestry.com build for its existing community project, the World Archives Project. Basically, this software allows people to register on Ancestry.com (this is free) and select a document in the queue, view a document, and then transcribe it so it will become searchable. The software knows the structure of the document you are transcribing and helps you through the process. Usually the way this kind of system works is that more than one person ends up transcribing each document, and then if there are any differences between the multiple transcriptions, an expert reviewer will check the transcription and correct any mistakes. This redundant system allows non-expert transcribers to help in a massive indexing projects like this one.
I wrote awhile back about the concept of giving back to genealogy through indexing projects like this one. In that article I explained how the process works at FamilySearch.org, whose indexing program is very similar. If you have been researching family members that were killed in the Holocaust then this is a great way to give back to the community. The millions of records being indexed from the USHMM archive will increase our knowledge about millions of people whose lives are recorded in these documents. Many of these documents will hold the key to families discovering what happened to their relatives during the war.
At the beginning, the project has started out indexing the following ten document collections:
USHMM Ain, France, Selected Holocaust Records
USHMM Czech Republic, Jews Deported to Terezin and Poland
USHMM Eure-et-Loir, France, Selected Holocaust Records
USHMM Munich, Germany, Displaced Jewish Orphans at the Ulm Children’s Home, 1945-1948
USHMM Palestine, Illegal Immigration from Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1938-1946
USHMM Poland, Jewish Holocaust Survivors Registered in Warsaw, 1945-1946
USHMM Poland, Jewish Prisoners of War in Lublin, 1939-1941
USHMM Poland, Jews Displaced from Biała Podlaska to Mie̜dzyrzecz Podlaski, 1942
USHMM Romania, Family Questionnaires for Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Victims, 1945
The languages vary per collection, but the system is designed to allow even those without knowledge of the specific language to help transcribe the documents. Of course, if you do know one of the languages from these collections, that can only help. As the Palestine collection was generated by the British Mandate government, that collection is largely in English.
The project expects the first documents to be made available by this summer or early fall. As more document collections are completed they will be added to the web site. Like other collections that are indexed by the public (through the World Archives Project), these collections will be free to search, even though it is being hosted by Ancestry.com.
To get an idea of how indexing a document works, you can view a video guide the project has posted for one of the Polish collections:
The video should give you a good idea of how the process works.
[Update: Ancestry seems to have removed the video from their site and made it private on Youtube. I don’t know why this is case, but you can go to their written explanation of the same data collection to see pictures of the records and what information is extracted from them.]
One important note, especially since I am a Mac user myself, is that the Ancestry.com software being used for this project does not support the Mac. You can only currently join this project if you are running Windows. Hopefully Ancestry.com will remedy this problem in the near future.
It seems this week has had two intertwined themes running through it, the Holocaust and the digitization of archives. This project certainly borrows from both themes and it is great that there is a way for everyone to help in bringing these very important archival materials online.
It wasn’t that long ago when collaborating with others doing genealogy research meant going to a local genealogy meeting, or traveling to a regional, national or international conference, or looking up fellow researchers in a printed directory, and sending people letters and documents via postal mail. While meeting other researchers in person is still a great thing, and sending items via postal mail can still occasionally be useful, the Internet has thankfully made finding and collaborating with other researchers easier.
I wrote earlier about finding other researchers who are looking for people with the same surnames in the same towns through the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF). That is the best way to find specific researchers that might be researching the same family members as you, but what about more general questions you might have? What if you don’t actually know which town the family lived in? What if the knowledge you need is not specific to your family, but something specific to a document you found – like interpreting a Polish-language birth certificate, or trying to find a town listed in a a document you’ve found.
While gaining access to many documents online is great for genealogy, and having a way to contact distant archives for free and quickly (via e-mail) is very helpful, the biggest improvement to genealogy in the past decades is really the ability to tap into the group knowledge of all the other researchers out there. There are various way to tap into this knowledge, but I think one of the most useful ways is the variety of topic-specific mailing lists out there. By finding the right mailing list, either a broadly defined group with many people, or a very narrowly defined group with only a handful of people, you can find the right people with the right knowledge to help you with your genealogy research.
JewishGen Lists
JewishGen operates a number of heavily-used mailing lists that are specific to Jewish genealogy. Starting with their main list, the JewishGen Discussion Group, which is a kind of catch-all list for Jewish genealogists where you can ask any questions you might have. If you follow this list you will learn a lot about the problems other people are having and will be able to apply some of their solutions to your own research.
In order to join a mailing list on JewishGen, you should first join JewishGen (which is free) and then go to the mailing list administration page to add lists you’d like to subscribe to to your account.
Besides the main list, they also have a large number of mailing lists that are connected to specific regional Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These include (with descriptions from the JewishGen site):
A forum for those researching Jewish genealogy in the areas formerly known as Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), plus parts of Austria, especially Vienna, but not Galicia.
A forum for researchers with Jewish family roots in country now known as Belarus and more specifically from the former Russian Gubernii (provinces) of Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk.
The Jews of Danzig/Gdańsk, and its precursor communities of Alt Schottland, Langfuhr, Mattenbuden, Weinberg, Danzig in der Breitgasse, and Tiegenhof (Nowy Dwór Gdański).
A forum for Jewish genealogical research in France and French colonies, as well as other French-speaking areas such as Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Hungarian Jewish Special Interest Group is for those with Jewish roots in the area known as “greater Hungary” including areas that at one time were predominantly Hungarian speaking.
Jewish Communities and Records (JCR-UK): A project to record genealogical and historical information concerning the Jewish communities of the United Kingdom.
A forum for those researching the city of Łódź, Poland, and localities within a 40 mile radius – in Congress Poland’s gubernias of Piotrków, Płock, Warszawa, and Kalisz.
A forum for those with Jewish roots in Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dobruja, Maramures, Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia (all within the modern nations of Romania, Moldova, and southwestern Ukraine).
A forum to discuss the genealogy and family history of Jewish communities of South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia (Rhodesia), Swaziland, Mozambique and the former Belgian Congo.
A forum for researchers with family origins in the former Russian Empire gubernias now in the Ukraine: Podolia, Volhynia, Kiev, Poltava, Chernigov, Kharkov, Kherson, Taurida and Ekaterinoslav.
While you might get lucky in the main research group, you will find that if you join one of these more specific groups you will be much more likely to find people researching the same families, or at least familiar with the resources available for researching your family from one of the regions covered. I recommend joining the main JewishGen list and whichever regional groups cover where you think your family originates.
Rootsweb
Rootsweb is one of the original online communities for genealogists. There are many free resources available on the site, including the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). They are now owned by Ancestry.com, although the sites are not directly connected.
Rootsweb hosts over 32,000 mailing lists covering many different genealogy topics, including specific regions, surnames, ethnicities, etc. Not all of these mailing lists have active users. You can sign up for a mailing list on Rootsweb and not see a post for months, even years, but there are still some very useful lists on rootsweb, and if you find the one person you need to answer your question, then it doesn’t matter how many message are posted a week. One way to gauge the current traffic of a mailing list is the browse the message archive and see how recently messages have been posted.
There are about 25 specifically Jewish lists on Rootsweb, including:
A mailing list for Jewish genealogy about the past Jewish community of the city of Berdichev, Russia (now Ukraine). See home page for more information.
For the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Brown surname and variations (e.g., Braun, Braumeister) with Jewish origins in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Austria, and Germany.
A mailing list for anyone with a genealogical interest in Grodno Gubernia, a division of the Russian Empire. While the focus of the list will be on Jewish family history research, other subscribers with an interest in the area are welcome. See home page for more information.
Jewish Hibel surname and variations (e.g., Hebel, Hübel, Huebel, Heubel, Hubal) in any place and at any time, but with an emphasis on Galicia/Eastern Europe.
A multilingual English-French-German mailing list for anyone with a genealogical, cultural or historical interest in the Province of Alsace, nowadays France, related to their Jewish roots. Anything that concerns Jewish-Alsatian traditions, culture, folklore, heritage, or why not old recipes and daily life in ancient times in the Province of Alsace is an appropriate topic.
A mailing list for anyone trying to trace their Jewish roots back to the 18th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania – Kingdom of Poland Commonwealth before Jews had surnames. Additional information can be found on the Jewish Family History Foundation website.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding Jewish but non-German branches of the Sztern surname and variations (e.g., Stern, Stein) at any time. Primary focus is on branches which were in BEL (Belarus), UKR (Ukraine), POL (Poland) and/or New York circa the late 1800s/early 1900s.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the originally eastern European Jewish surname Tesler, Tessler, and Teszler in any place and at any time.
A mailing list for anyone researching their Jewish roots in the Chernigov Gubernia, a province in Russia from 1802-1929/1932 and since then a province in the Ukraine known as Chernigov Oblast. See home page for more information.
A mailing list for anyone with a genealogical interest in the Jews who once lived in the Kremenets District of Ukraine and their descendants. Topics will include updates and discussions about Jewish genealogy in the towns, villages and shtetlach of the Kremenets District.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Winograd surname and variations (e.g., Winagrad, Wynagrad, Wynograd) in any place and at any time but primarily Jewish Winograds originating in Poland or Belarus.
A mailing list for the discussion and sharing of information regarding the Jewish surname Wolfshaut and variations (e.g., Wolfsont, Wolfsout, Wolfshout, Wolfshant, Wolfsant, Wolfsaut, Wolfshont, Wolfset) in any place and at any time.
Most of the above lists, with the exception of British-Jewry, are not particularly high-traffic lists, but many of them have people who are very knowledgeable about their topics who can help you if your research falls into the purview of their topic.
Google Groups (and Usenet)
I’m going to mention Google Groups quickly, because it is after all Google, but truthfully there are not lot of groups on Google of interest to Jewish genealogists. The primary resource on Google Groups that is useful to Jewish genealogists is access to the newsgroups that are a part of the very old Usenet system, in particular soc.genealogy.jewish.
soc.genealogy.jewish is a way to look back at more than 15 years of Jewish genealogy discussions, and searching it through Google’s interface is a great way to find out about the discussions that have taken place about towns and surnames you are researching. soc.genealogy.jewish is still actively used so you can post new messages there and get responses to your general questions as well.
Google Groups does allow you to set up your own mailing lists, but there are not many Jewish genealogy mailing lists on Google Groups, and I suspect the reason is simply that Yahoo Groups are much easier to set up and manage.
Yahoo Groups
If you decide one day that you want to start your own Jewish genealogy mailing list – perhaps covering your ancestral town or your family, etc. Yahoo Groups is a great way to set up a mailing list quickly. In addition to a mailing list, you also get a file upload area, photo albums, a database and other advanced features. It is also very easy to manage the mailing list, moderate messages, reject messages that are spam, or even to modify messages before they get posted (such as adding a moderator’s message when a discussion veers off-track). Because setting this up is so easy, it really has become the serivce of choice for setting up small discussion groups for many topics.
There are dozens upon dozens of groups of interest to Jewish genealogists on Yahoo. The best thing for you to do is try searching for your ancestral towns, or regions, or surnames, etc. and see if there are groups already set up to discuss your specific areas of interest. The following table is a list of those groups that mention Jewish genealogy, but many likely do not use those specific words, but will show up if you’re searching for them by town name, etc. The following table is not alphabetical, but actually ordered according to whatever metric Yahoo uses to determine the popularity of a group. The more popular groups are at the beginning of the table and the popularity declines are you continue down the table.
The purpose of this forum is to discuss SEPHARDIC/JEWISH GENEALOGY, GENEALOGY TOOLS, HISTORY, CUSTOMS and other issues related to genealogy. We invite those of good will regardless of religious beliefs to visit and participate.
Researching your Jewish ancestors from the Pultusk area, north of Warsaw? Link up with others also looking for family tree connections in Pultusk and surrounding area, now in Poland and once part of the Tsarist Russian Empire.
For anyone with a connection to or interest in the town of Keidan, Lithuania. For nearly 500 years, Keidan – now called Kedainiai – was home to a proud and vibrant Jewish community.
This group is composed of genealogists, who are researching their Jewish roots to the town of Nowy Sacz, Poland. In the past this town has been known as Neu Sandec, Neu Sandez, Nowy Sancz, Tsants, Sants, Tsanz, Sanz, Zanz,etc. See here for more info.
The mission of the genealogy group is to research information about Sephardic Jewish Families from France and Canada. This includes the discussion of the Canadian-Anusim Family Tree DNA Project and our test results.
The Jewish community of Jebenhausen, near Goeppingen in Wuerttemberg (Germany), was founded in 1777 and dissolved in 1900. This list aims at a virtual reunion of descendants of Jebenhausen’s Jewish families, and invites discussions on all issues relevant to the community history, genealogy and related matters.
DNA Researcher group for Jewish people in the R1b haplogroup. The R1b haplogroup is the most common haplogroup in Western Europe, yet it is found in only a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews (roughly 10%).
This group is concerned with genealogy in the Botosani (Romania) area. The majority of members are of Jewish descent although there is no plan to omit anyone else. Everyone interested in Botosani is welcome.
This group has been set up with the purpose of collecting and sharing information concerning Vistytis and all those individuals and families who have their origins there or for those who have an interest in the town.
This group is for those interested in tracing their Jewish family roots in and around the area of northwest Ukraine known as Volhynia Gubernia, which borders Poland and Belarus. Among the major cities in Volhynia are Lutsk and the crossroads city of Kovel.
This Jewish genealogy group is dedicated to the town of BORSZCZO’W which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine. See here for more info.
The International Sephardic Discussion Group is an Internet based group of members who discuss issues pertaining to Sephardim, past and present. We do not talk about religion on this list.
Between 1882 and 1884, as many as 80 Jewish immigrants came to Cotopaxi, Colorado, in an attempt to farm the land there. This is a place for those who are researching the genealogy of the Cotopaxi Colony.
The site was created to allow those with Ancestral Roots belonging to the village of Hostów ( Hostiv, Gostev, Gostiv Pop 1983-36% Polish in Y1907)and Tarnowica Polna (Ternovytsa, Pop 1798 -90% Polish) located 3 km apart to connect with their ancestral history within Eastern Galicia(Pokucie/Kresy).
For descendants of Jews who lived in or near the Jewish Shtetl (town) of Plontch (Polaniec), which was located in Kielce Gubernia, in South-Eastern Poland.
This Jewish genealogy group is dedicated to the town of Czortkow which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Isaac and Samuel SHUTER, sons of Michael SHUTER from Lissa, Prussia (now Leszno, Poland) were both married in the Great Synagogue of London in the year 1850.
Dedicated to the town of Kalusz (Kalush) which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Dedicated to the town of Mielnitsa which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of WW1(Galicia) then became part of Poland until the end of WW2 and is now in the Ukraine.
Devoted to exchange of information about Jewish residents of pre-1939 Jaslo – a town in southeastern Poland’s district of Podkarpackie (formerly in Galicia).
A list for all the STOTTERs who wish to find out if and how they are connected.
Other Groups and Lists
There are numerous other mailing lists and discussion groups out there on the Internet, and you should try searching for groups that are connected to your specific research areas such as town names and surnames. For towns, always check the ShtetLinks page for your town to see if they mention other resources like mailing lists. Also search the archives of the larger lists like the main JewishGen list, or a regional list like Gesher Galicia (if your town is from Galicia) to see if other mailing lists have been mentioned for your town or whatever topic you are researching. You can even search all of the JewishGen mailing lists at once.
If I’ve missed a great Jewish genealogy mailing list, please let me know in the comments.
UPDATED:
I will be adding mailing lists mentioned in the comments at the end of the posting as people make me aware of them.
For descendants of Wolinsky (and variants Wolin, Wolins, Woliyniec, Wolinetz) from the town of Antopol, Russia (now Belarus) and the surrounding area. This group includes descendants of Baruch Wolinsky of Antopol.
A mailing list composed of Jewish survivors from Mir, descendents of former residents and descendents of students of the Mir Yeshiva. Link is for the web site, e-mail the moderator for access to the mailing list.
It might seem strange that you could have an address for a relative, but not their name. It’s not as strange as you think. Addresses require a level of accuracy that names historically have not had.
For example, I know that my gg-grandparents lived in New York under my gg-grandmother’s surname and not my gg-grandfather’s surname. That has caused no end to problems in tracking down evidence that they lived in New York at all during the years I know they lived there around the turn of the last century. The fact that they lived under my gg-gradmother’s surname indicates perhaps that there were other reasons not to list their real name. Perhaps they did not arrive legally in the country. I don’t know the answer to that question yet. I’ve tried without success to find reference to them in the censuses that happened while they lived in New York, but have never found them under either surname. Searching by name on the commercial databases like Ancestry.com works very well these days, so if they were in the census records under either name I should be able to find them, yet I haven’t found them yet. It could be that they used even another name, that their name was transcribed incorrectly, or that they’re just not in the census records.
This brings up what used to be the way people searched census records, before they were indexed by name. You would find where your ancestor lived, then based on the address figure out the enumeration district that address would be in, then go through all the pages of the census for that enumeration district until you found the address, and then look for your relatives.
Recently I found a document that listed my gg-grandfather’s address in 1902 in New York. Now, of course he could have moved there just before listing that address, but it was sufficiently close to 1900 for me to look into that address during the 1900 US Federal Census.
So how do you go about doing that? First, you need to figure out the enumeration district in 1900 for the address. In this case the address is 60 Cannon St. in Manhattan. This address doesn’t even exist today, as the streets downtown in New York have changed, but you can get around that fact by looking at old maps of the city.
For New York luckily there is a street atlas from 1899 that has been put online by the New York Public Library. If you go to the link, you’ll see thumbnails of the pages in the atlas. You can’t search the atlas by street name, but there is an index page that will tell you the page number to look for:
Manhattan Street Atlas from 1899 hosted by the NY Public Library
If you click on the index page and zoom in, you can find Cannon St. and see which pages it shows up on:
Close-up of index page of 1899 NY street atlas
As you can see, numbers 2-104 (even) and 1-105 (odd) are on page 15. Now actually figuring out which thumbnail is page 15 isn’t so easy, but if you search for ’15’ it will come up as one of the options and a little trial-and-error will get you to the correct page:
Page from 1899 NY street atlas showing Cannon St.
Unfortunately the zoom function for this particular site is really not so easy to use. It makes you look at a very small section of the page, and move around by bumping the view left, right, up or down a bit. However, once you zoom in on Cannon St. you can look for #60:
Close-up of 1899 NY atlas page that shows the address we’re trying to find
As I mentioned, the zoom function doesn’t work so well so you need to look at what you can identify easy, such as the big 328 for the block, and then zoom out so you can see the cross streets:
From this view you can see the block of interest, and the cross streets
Now we know that the cross-streets are Rivington (above the block) and Delancey (below the block). Why is that important? Because the next step is to figure out the enumeration district, and those cross-streets will help.
As you can see in the image, I’ve selected 1900 at the top, then New York for the state and Manhattan for the city. I’ve then added the three streets from the block. If I had just entered Cannon St., the list of districted would have been very long. By adding three streets it should come down to one or two districts. In this case as you can see it has determined two districts, 288 and 291. Why are there two districts for one block? The reason is easy to figure out – Cannon St. on that block must have been the border between two districts. In one district we should find odd number addresses, and in the other we should find even number addresses.
So where do we go to look for the census images for these districts? There are a few options, but I’m going to show how to do it on Ancestry.com which is what I use for census images.
Ancestry.com allows you to search by name, but as I described that didn’t help me in this case. If you’ve used Ancestry.com to look at census images, you may not have noticed that it also allows you to browse by enumeration district:
Selecting an enumeration district on Ancestry.com
In the above image I’ve already chosen the 1900 census to search exclusively. On the left side is the search interface that most people use, but on the right side (in the red box I’ve added) is a panel that allows you to browse by enumeration district. You can see I’ve selected New York for the state, New York for the County and Manhattan for the township. It then lists all of the enumeration districts, and I can select which one to view.
If you were to select enumeration district 288 first, and scan through the pages to find Cannon St., you would notice that all the addresses are odd numbers. That fits with my guess on the street being the border of an enumeration district. If you skip over to enumeration district 291, you will see that the numbers are all even. Oddly there are a few street numbers from Cannon St. at the beginning of the census file, then it jumps to another street, and then back to Cannon St. later.
60 Cannon St. in the 1910 census
Up until now I’ve been showing you how to take an address and find the census records for that address. The second lesson I want to teach here at this point is to keep your records organized an to always refer to your notes before jumping into a research project like this. If I had done so I would have noticed that I have another document from 1901 (a Declaration of Intent to Naturalize) that lists a different address. In fact the 1903 Petition was also in an entirely different address, so three addresses in three years. I guess they moved around a lot. If I had not jumped into the research before looking at what other documents I had, I would have saved a lot of time. It still makes for a good example for this blog, however, so I hope it was helpful.
To end the post I should add that the address from 1901 was on the other side of the same block (i.e. the next street over) on the same map page I found for Cannon St., and the address showed up in enumeration district 288, the same one that had the odd street numbers for Cannon St. (this address was even numbered) and unfortunately also came up empty. Considering they lived at different addresses in 1901, 1902 and 1903, I guess it’s not too surprising that they lived someplace else in 1900 as well.
There is a wealth of genealogical information buried in the stacks of old newspaper stored in various libraries worldwide. Depending on whether you live in the same place as your ancestors, accessing these archives could be exceedingly difficult, and of course physical newspapers don’t have a search button. Nowadays, however, there are a number of initiatives to digitally scan and make accessible newspapers large and small from across the world. Some of these efforts are commercial and require payment to use, while some are funded through non-profit organizations or universities and are free to access online. In the past there were efforts to index obituaries, and while obituaries can contain many genealogical clues inside, these new fully searchable newspaper databases can contain much more information.
It’s been my observation that if you had family living in a small communities, then these searchable newspapers can be even more useful. Small community newspapers tend to cover a lot more of what is going on with people in the community than larger community papers that cover news on a much smaller percentage of people in the community.
GenealogyBank.com
On of the best resources I’ve found for searching newspapers across the US is GenealogyBank.com. It is a commercial service, but they earn their money by constantly adding new content to the site. They currently have over 4500 newspapers online. It costs about $56/year for the service (go to their subscribe page, then try to close the page and it will offer to a 20% discount bringing the annual price from $70 to $56) which I think is quite reasonable. You can also try it out for 30 days for free. In addition to newspapers, they also have some historical books, documents and their own version of the Social Security Death Index (SSDI).
A newspaper with red box around relevant article
Annotating a PDF
The best part is once you find a newspaper page with something relevant to you, you can simply down the page as a PDF to your computer. What I do when sharing a page with relatives is I open the PDF and use the built-in annotation features of the program I use (I use Preview on the Mac, but Adobe Reader should be able to do the same thing) to create a red box around the part of the page that contains information on my relative. The reason this can be important is that if you’re sending a large newspaper page it can be hard sometimes to find the part of the page that contains the information you’re trying to relay, especially with older newspapers that can be very dense and hard to read. See an example to the right.
Naming Newspaper Images
Another tip when dealing with organizing these pages is to prefix the file name with the date it was published. I use this technique on many types of documents, but it is particularly useful for newspapers. In the case of one family group, I found about 50 newspaper articles that mention them over a span of 70 years. When I download the newspaper page I name it something like:
19171119 Aug Chron – Pinkey Silver app for citizenship.pdf
First you have the date, formatted as YYYYMMDD which is easily sortable. I then add the newspaper name – in this case the Augusta Chronicle (from Georgia) and then a short summary of what is in the article. Thankfully we’re not restricted to something like FILENAME.PDF like in the old days. As you collect newspaper articles from different sources, you can put them all in one directory and see them easily sorted by date of publication, see which papers they came from and who is mentioned in them. It makes finding the article you’re looking for much easier later on when you want to send that one relevant article to a relative.
Other Newspaper Sources
GenealogyBank.com is not the only game in town. There are other commercial services, some larger genealogy websites like Ancestry.com also have newspaper archives included in their databases, but more interesting I think are the smaller initiatives that you need to really search for in small towns and on the state level. For example, as I mentioned in a previous post, there is a project in the state of Georgia called the Digital Library of Georgia run by the university system of Georgia. The site contains digital archives of several local Georgia newspapers, searchable and viewable using the DjVu plug-in. You need to install a DjVu plug-in for your browser in order to use these archives, but once you install it it’s fairly easy to use. It’s not as easy as being able to view the newspapers online and then download a PDF, however. You can download the DjVu files (which are very small) or convert them to TIFF files (which are absurdly large in this case). If you do have the DjVu plug-in convert the image to a TIFF, keep in mind that it does not use compression. Simply opening the TIFF in an image editor and activating LZW compression for the TIFF will save a lot of space, and won’t affect the quality of the image.
Selecting LZW compression for a TIFF
In Preview on the Mac all you do is open the file, select Save As… from the File Menu, select LZW from the Compression menu as shown in the image on the left.
You can also save the image as a JPEG or whatever format you want. I would suggest perhaps converting the image to a JPEG when e-mailing the image to a relative, but you may find it is not as readable asit is as a DjVu or a TIFF image, because the DjVu is highly compressed (much more than JPEG) and when you expand it out to a TIFF you still have all the artifacts left from the DjVU compression. When you then re-compress it as a JPEG you get new compression artifacts, which mix with the DjVu ones.
Another similar newspaper archive effort I’ve come across is the Northern New York Historical Newspapers project run by the Northern New York Library Network. I’m sure there are many more.
Google operates a newspaper archive search where you can many articles, some of whcih you need to pay to read.
The Library of Congress has a project called Chronicling America where you can search historical newspapers between the years 1860 and 1922.
You should also try searching for newspaper archives on your favorite search engine. New ones seem to pop up all the time, so if you don’t find one now, try again another time.
Jewish Newspapers Online
For Jewish researchers I will point out a few interesting examples of newspaper and magazine archives I’ve come across.
There is the Southern Israelite, covering the year between 1929 and 1986, part of the previously mentioned Digital Library of Georgia. Note that while it was published in Georgia, it does cover some other southern states, so if your Jewish family lived down south, you might find some news listed in this paper.
There is also the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, which includes three different Jewish community newspapers published between 1895 and the present.
For Chicago, there is a local Jewish paper called The Sentinel, covering the years 1911 through 1949.
One very interesting project is run at the National Library of Israel, called the Historical Jewish Press. This project currently includes twenty newspapers, some going back to the mid-19th century, including over 400,000 pages. The languages of the papers include Hebrew, French, Hungarian and English. The only English newspaper in the project right now is the Palestine Post, the original name of what is now the Jerusalem Post, and it covers the years 1932-1950 (the years before it changed its name to the Jerusalem Post). The French papers include one from France, but also papers from Morocco and Egypt. The Hebrew papers include ones from Israel, but also papers from Tsarist Russia and one published in Prussia, Poland and Austria.
Please add what you know or what you find to the comments
Please, if you know of other good online newspaper sites, mention them in the comments. You can also share your success stories in the comments.
For an example of how the information in these types of records are not always reliable, read my earlier post People lie, and so do documents which discussed confirming information found in two obituaries which I found through one of these online newspaper archives.
If you use Ancestry.com and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might know about their Tree-to-Go app that came out awhile back. It was a very basic application for viewing the family trees that you had on Ancestry.com. Frankly, it wasn’t particularly useful, as it only let you view the trees you had uploaded to Ancestry.com and wasn’t very interactive. In addition, if you had an iPad with its larger screen, it was not optimized for that, and could not show anything more on the iPad than on the iPhone.
This new version seems much more polished, and adds some major features.
First off, it fully supports the iPad, and can take advantage of the larger screen. You can now see not only the trees you have on Ancestry.com, but those that are shared with you from other users.
Also, if you’ve attached records to people in your tree, such as a census record, you can now view those records on your device (see the picture on the right).
For those who use both Ancestry.com and an iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) this seems like a very useful application, especially if you share trees with other Ancestry.com users. They also announced that they are ‘carefully considering’ the creation of an Android version as well, although I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an Android version.
The interesting thing to me about this seemingly very polished application is the contrast this illustrates with the Mac application they also recently introduced. Why is their iOS app so much more polished than their Mac app? It might seem odd that the iOS app, which is free, has had more attention in its design than their Mac application for which they charge quite a lot. I suspect the answer to this question is that the development of their iOS app is done by a completely different team than the one that handles Family Tree Maker. I’m not sure either of these applications are developed in-house by Ancestry, but either way it seems the teams working on these are completely different.
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