Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Mining the MyHeritage Newspaper Collections - Finding a 1939 Annie (Richmond) Pickford Obituary

 I occasionally "mine" the MyHeritage record collections using the "Discoveries > Matches by Source" links to find records not on other record providers.  I have not done a lot of searching on the "Massachusetts Newspapers, 1704-1974" collection, but MyHeritage tells me that there are 1,365 Record Matches in this collection.  These are matches for person profiles in my MyHeritage family tree, so it's a targeted search - nearly every match will be for someone in my tree.

I opened it and was scrolling down the list and saw a match with my Grandaunt, Annie Frances (Richmond) Pickford in the Clinton [Mass.] Daily Item newspaper, dated 7 July 1939.

Seeing that the article matched all of the details in the tree profile (on the left of the screen above), I clicked on the orange "Review Match" button for this article, and saw:

The screen provided an OCR transcription of the article, but it is pretty poor.  At least the names are highlighted.

Further down, I can see the actual article, and read it (after zooming into it):

I did not see a way to save the newspaper page, or clip the article.  There is a "Print" link at the bottom of the screen, but I can print only what is on the screen and could send it to a file.

I chose to right-click on the image of the newspaper page, and save it as a JPG file.

From that, I can use the Windows Snipping Tool to clip the obituary from the page and save it to my file for Annie Frances Richmond on my computer:

I clicked on the orange "Confirm Match" button and clicked on "Save to Tree" so that this page of the newspaper will be linked to the Anne Frances Richmond profile on MyHeritage.

I transcribed this obituary and put it in the General Note for Grandaunt Annie in RootsMagic.  I will copy it into a FamilySearch Family Tree, a WikiTree, and a Geni Note soon. 

MyHeritage has Newspaper collections for almost every state, and some of the newspapers provided are unique to MyHeritage.  

If a researcher wants to find "every record" for a person, they need to "fish in all ponds."  MyHeritage makes it easy to bait the hook for the researcher, and all you have to do is reel it in!

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Disclosure:  I receive a complimentary subscription to MyHeritage, and gave received other material consideration in past years.  I uploaded my autosomal DNA raw data to their DNA product.  This does not affect my objective analysis of MyHeritage products.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2020/11/mining-myheritage-newspaper-collections.html

Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

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