Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Mining the NewspaperARCHIVE Collection on MyHeritage Record Matches

I noted in Mining More Record Matches on MyHeritage on 27 March 2015 that I had many more Record Matches to review.  As most Genea-Musings readers know, a "Record Match" in MyHeritage is a record that MyHeritage thinks applies to a person in my MyHeritage family tree - the MyHeritage search system did this automagically while I slept, blogged or watched the baseball game.

Every once in awhile, I go in and "mine" one of these collections - in other words, search for information in records that I do not have for persons in my family tree database, and add content and a source citation to my database.

Today, I noticed that MyHeritage had 666 Record Matches for me from the NewspaperArchive collection on MyHeritage.  I don't have a subscription to NewspaperArchive, but MyHeritage provides images and OCR transcriptions to records in the collection.  The process for capturing information from this collection on MyHeritage is fairly straightforward:

1)  On the list of Record Matches from the NewspaperARCHIVE collection, I saw an item for the marriage of Helen Josephine Hosford and Cecil A. Munger in Belleville, Kansas:



I looked in my family tree database, and don't have a source citation for this marriage - this is an opportunity to add one to the database.

2)  I clicked on the link for the record, and saw information about the newspaper, the issue date, and an image of the newspaper page (two screens shown):


I could see that the wedding article was in two columns, I could zoom in one level but the article still wasn't easy to read.  I didn't see a way to download the page from the screen above.

3)  I clicked on the orange "Full screen" button and saw:


There is a Download icon (the down arrow icon in the black header next to the orange "Exit full screen" button).  I clicked that, and was able to save the page as a PDF file.

I opened the PDF file, and zoomed into the article and was able to read it easily:


From here, I used my Windows Snipping Tool to snip the two parts of the article and saved the snippets to my file for the Munger family.  Next, I transcribed the article into the marriage event Note in my family tree database, and crafted a source citation for the event.  Here is my source citation crafted using the "Newspapers, Online Images" source template in RootsMagic 7:

"Munger-Hosford," wedding announcement, The Belleville (Kansas) Telescope, 10 July 1930, page 5, column 4, marriage of Helen Josephine Hosford and Cecil A. Munger, 25 June 1930; digital images, MyHeritage.com (http://www.myheritage.com : accessed 12 May 2015), citing NewspaperARCHIVE (http://www.NewspaperARCHIVE.com) collection.

4)  Back on the MyHeritage Record Match screen for the item, I clicked on the "Confirm" button below the page image.  A popup box told me that the "Record Match Confirmed":


Then I could extract information into my MyHeritage family tree for this event (two screens below):



I clicked the right arrow to include the information and the source, and then clicked the light green "Save to tree" and the record was attached to the two person profiles in the marriage event.

5)  These Record Matches of NewspaperARCHIVE articles in the MyHeritage system are really useful to add detail and context to persons in my family tree.  When you find a newspaper, like the Belleville [Kansas] Telescope, you can really find some gems for your ancestral families and relatives.  

One caveat:  Because these matches are found based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the matches are not always correct.  I've found that the accuracy rate is about 50% for the NewspaperARCHIVE collection on MyHeritage.  However, it is still easier to use these Record Matches than to blindly search every digital newspaper archive website for nuggets. 

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/05/mining-newspaperarchive-collection-on.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

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