This week's Tuesday's Tip is: Use the Google News Archive Search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch/) feature to find newspaper articles to enhance your family history research.
The Google News Archive searches some (but not all!) historical and current newspapers for your search query terms. There are several types of content:
* Content that is accessible to all users (such as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian)
* Content that requires a fee (such as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives).
* Content from newspapers in the Google News Archive Partner Program.
See the Google News Archive Help page at http://news.google.com/archivesearch/help.html for more information.
One of the key features is the "Timeline" that appears at the top of the search results:
The user can see the time periods for search results of the search query terms. The user can click on a decade in the timeline to narrow the search to that time period.
There is an Advanced Search query form that permits narrowing the search to specific words and phrases, a date range, a language, a specific source, etc.
The biggest benefit to my research has been finding free newspaper content in recently published newspapers and in historical newspapers (e.g., the New York Times before 1923).
Many of the websites that require payment offer a snippet of information from the article. Those articles are helpful - they tell me that there is an article of interest, and that I can obtain it by paying for it online or by visiting a repository that holds the newspaper/magazine in question (for instance, my local library has the New York Times on microfilm).
The Google News Archive is just one of many newspaper resources available to the family history researcher. Some are freely available, and some require a subscription to access the articles. Some subscription sites are available at a local library (some are online with a library card).
The URL for this post is http://www.geneamusings.com/2011/06/tuesdays-tip-use-google-news-archive.html
(c) 2011. Randall J. Seaver. All Rights Reserved. If you wish to re-publish my content, please contact me for permission, which I will usually grant. If you are reading this on any other genealogy website, then they have stolen my work.
1 comment:
Thanks for this tip - I found some interesting information on my g-grandfather that I'll include in an article I'm writing about him. I hadn't known of google news archive before.
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