Thursday, January 3, 2008

Checking in with GenealogyBank

Tom Kemp on the Genealogy Bank blog posted that they have added another 2.8 million records at Genealogy Bank, and that there are now over 2,300 newspapers in the Historical Newspaper section and over 1,000 newspapers in the America's Obituaries section.

The complete list of the newspapers archived on GenealogyBank is at http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/sourcelistNewspapers.html. This is indeed an impressive list.

The home page for GenealogyBank is at http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/keyword.html - they list the collections that they have for historical and modern records.

I don't subscribe to Genealogy Bank, since I've thought that many of their records are available on other web sites. I'm going to compare what they have with the newspaper holdings on other sites.

I've been hoping that one of these newspaper archives sites will digitize and index the San Diego Union newspaper before 2000, and I know one of my CVGS colleagues is anxiously waiting for a major Philadelphia newspaper between 1922 and 1977 to find her John Robinson Hall's obituary and death date.

1 comment:

cheekygnome said...

I've compared them to several other newspaper sites and I've yet to find another site that is close to them in terms of either the variety of titles they carry or the range of dates that their collection represents. While I'm not crazy about their search methods or the sorting of the results, they do tend to give fewer junk results than other sites. For instance if you search for a name and it turns up in an obit in 1899 then their results tell you it is an obit. They have several other categories for results such as "News Article", "Legislative" and "Advertisement". Those pesky advertisement results are the thing that frustrates me the most about newspaper sites. At least with Genealogy Bank you know ahead of time that you are getting an advertisement results rather than having to click on it to find out.