Bill Dollarhide published a great list of online historical newspaper archives in the January/February 2008 issue of Everton's Genealogical Helper. In his list, he included the Northern New York Newspaper Project at http://news.nnyln.net/, a free site, provided by the Northern New York Library Network to enhance access to the region's local history.
One of my CVGS colleagues, Shirley B., told me about another historical newspaper archive for northern New York - at Tom Tryniski's Fulton History site - http://www.fultonhistory.com/. Tom has many genealogy and history resources on his site, including:
* over 6 million historical newspaper images from over 190 historical newspapers. When you enter the site, the search box for the newspapers is on the top of the left hand frame of the web page. Use the link at http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html to go to the FAQ page for the site (up at the top on the right hand frame of the page), which has a link to the list of newspapers. The images are in PDF format, and the search engine can use quote marks or fuzzy searches.
* Fulton NY Historical Photo albums - click the "View Fulton Historical Photos" link at the bottom of the right hand frame on the web page. There are 44 sets of photographs and images here. If you have ancestry in or near Fulton NY, you have to check these outs.
* There are old radio programs playing continuously - click on the "Paused" link on the right hand side of the radio screen in the right hand frame on the web page. When I clicked on this today, a segment from "The Shadow" started playing.
* There is a link to Old Fulton Post Cards at the bottom of the left hand frame of the web page, but it is a place holder at this time. The goal is probably to add a historical post card collection here.
My interest in this web site is the historical newspaper archives. Attentive readers know that I'm searching for Russell and Esther Smith who resided in Oneida county NY in the 1800 to 1820 time frame. I input ["russell smith"] in the Search box and had 2,746 matches. Too many. I searched for ["russell smith" esther] and got 343 matches. I then searched for ["russell smith" esther western oneida] and got 54 matches, which I reviewed and didn't find any that were useful, but if there had been they might have really helped me.
I also searched just for ["seaver"] and got over 5,000 matches. Many of these were for articles about the New York Mets and pitcher Tom Seaver (my distant cousin), but there were a substantial number of obtiuaries and articles from the 1880 to 1930 time frame, especially in the Watertown (NY) Daily Times newspaper. I had an enjoyable three hours the other day transcribing some of these into my Seaver database. I have a lot more to find and transcribe - I only went through the first 100 matches.
In most cases, the articles and obituaries found in my Seaver searches provided excellent secondary information about children, spouses, dates, occupations, life experiences, etc.
Web sites like Tom's provide significant and often unique resources to the genealogy and history researcher. I really appreciate the ability to perform a search with quote marks to narrow the search. This is a "don't miss" web site if you have northern New York (centered on the Syracuse area, but many of the newspapers are hundreds of miles away).
UPDATED: Dick Hillenbrand posted about this site two weeks ago in http://ny-genes.blogspot.com/2008/04/fulton-history-newspaper-database-gets.html. I missed Dick's post at the time, and he has more information about Tom's web site.
1 comment:
Randy, Thanks for the tip...this is great. I have two branches of my family in St Lawrence County that were there for about 100 years...there may be some cousins in the area still.
Tim Agazio
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