Wednesday, October 2, 2019

GenealogyBank Offers Historical Newspaper Search for FamilySearch Family Tree Ancestors

I received this information via email from GenealogyBank today:

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We're excited to announce that a beta version of our new family tree feature is now live.

If you have a tree on FamilySearch.org, you can use the link below to select an ancestor and do a more powerful search in our historical newspaper collection. We built it to save you time and increase the chances you’ll discover something new.

You can try out the new feature here: www.genealogybank.com/family-tree-search

Your feedback about the new feature will help us make future improvements, so send us a note at beta@genealogybank.com.


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This sounded interesting - a targeted search for historical newspaper articles on GenealogyBank for entries in FamilySearch Family Tree.  I decided to check it out.  Using the link in the email, I had to identify myself in the FamilySearch Family Tree:

I signed into the FamilySearch Family Tree, and after some seconds, the screen below appeared:

Under "Ancestor": on the screen above, I selected my grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942).  I clicked on "Search" and received five matches from newspapers in the GenealogyBank collection:


The first three matches are for my parents wedding in July 1942, but the fourth match is from 1917.  I clicked on that match, and saw the newspaper page from the Norwich [Conn.] Morning Bulletin dated 13 November 1917 which had the obituary for my great-grandfather, Thomas Richmond (1848-1917) on it.

I have a clipping of this obituary, but did not know what newspaper it was clipped from.

Using the clipping tool on the GenealogyBank site, I can select the article and clip it and save it to my computer:
Here is the resulting article clipping I saved on my computer:

Of course, this feature only works for newspapers in the GenealogyBank collection, but it is a wonderful resource to find articles about specific persons. 

I did not see a way to modify the search criteria if I wanted to.  My guess is that the search fields contain the name of the person, the birth to death year range, and perhaps the town/county/state locations in the FamilySearch Family Tree record.

I look forward to methodically going through my family members to find more newspaper articles.  I've already found several for myself, my brothers, my parents and grandparents.  This is real genealogy fun!!

UPDATE:  I see I didn't snip the last two sentences of the article, which were one column to the right.  Oh well.

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Disclosure:  I currently have a paid yearly subscription to GenealogyBank, and have for three years.  Earlier, I had a complimentary subscription courtesy of GenealogyBank.  

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2019/10/genealogybank-offers-historical.html

Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

Diane Gould Hall said...

This seems like it would be very useful. I have a tree on family search, but with only 8-10 people. Sooooo....decisions to make. I have always had a subscription to GB.
I have never wanted a tree on FS due to the collaborative nature of it, as others can change things. I experimented with a few people and have not been happy with the result.
Gonna have to think about this one. Thanks for sharing Randy.

RonNasty said...

Hopefully they'll have a free preview weekend one day so I can try this out.

David said...

Again loose terminology catches people out. They are NOT using a person's tree. They are using the whole FSFT. I really, really, really wish people would be more careful with the terminology as it causes massive problems. People are too possessive of "their" tree and get bent out of shape when others edit their relatives. The fact that the whole thing is one, shared tree has just gone straight over their heads.

The shared, single tree nature of the site is fundamental to the way it works and it is really aggravating when people just ignore the entire paradigm of the site.