The quality of images of old newspapers that you are searching on newspaper
websites dramatically impacts the types of results that you will receive. The
reason is the optical character recognition scans on these old
newspapers to use computers to index images. Today we're going to talk about
how to overcome some of the problems associated with the OCR scans of
newspapers.
Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics, where we help you climb your family tree understand DNA and write the
stories of your ancestors along the way. Today we're gonna continue on newspapers
series and if you've missed any of our previous newspaper research videos be
sure to check the end screen at the end of this video or the description below
this video for the links that you need to go check them up. Today we're talking
about how to overcome OCR challenges in newspapers and we're going to use
newspapers.com, but you can use any newspaper research website. We're looking
at a typical entry in a newspaper, in this case we're looking at society news
and we can see an article where Mrs. Alexander B Hustin or Huston H u s t o n
it's having a reception and has invited a number of people to attend. As you look
through you're gonna see some smudges, some even more smudges, even more smudges,
and those smudges make it difficult for the optical character recognition, the
OCR program, to scan these documents and rabidly read them and turn them into digital
text. Now as we continue to span further down the page you're gonna see more of
that black smudging, the beginning of the blurring of the letters, but as you get
way down to the bottom it is really really hard to read the names of the
people that attended this event. And the question is what if your ancestors names
are right here? Let me demonstrate how that OCR does not pick up some of the
names that we see here on the newspaper article. Let's type in Albert Carey type
that in and press find. So, even though this page is a little bit blurry and the
there's that black hue behind it kind of smudging out the details the OCR was
able to pick up that name but if I was searching for Maude Stone because I
didn't know that Maude was named Mrs. Albert Carey I didn't know that she
married. Watch what happens the OCR did not recognize this stone it only
recognizes Maude. So one of the strategies you're going to apply when
you're researching in newspapers is you're going to sometimes search for
just their names, and sometimes just for first name, and yeah you're gonna get a
lot of results but make sure you narrow down to a time and a place and then just
be willing to check out the results. It is worth it when you're trying to crack
brick walls because you never know where the information is hiding, but general
interest I can understand if you don't go down this route. Before we continue
with the rest of this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit the
bell to be notified of future videos. So I hope that was an interesting look at
the actual newspaper seeing how blurry pages, faded, scrunch drip writing, and these
type of things in the newspapers contribute to OCR problems. Now how do
you get around them? Now one way is to use OCR substitutes there are common
letters that are looked the same when the computer is reading a document. You
will often find a B will be included as an H rather than the B or the C will be
an e or an e will be the C and vice-versa so develop a list of substitutes. If you'll
check the description below I'll have a link to my blog blog.familyhistoryfanatics.com
to a specific article that's going to give you a list of
letter substitutes that you can implement in your OCR searches. Be sure
to check it out. So when you're searching for a name or a business or some of the
other keywords that we mentioned in a previous video what you need to do is
substitute letters. So, let's say you're looking for the last name that you see
on this screen well we have c's we have h's we have b's we have e's let's play
around with different substitutes so maybe you'll put this in. Now I don't
even know how to say that name the first one looks like schibler this one looks
like it's Skiblyn maybe, but to the OCR it looks the same. So, try the different
substitutes you may try this one Shiblin it's very similar to Schibler
but the R got messed up and how about this one. So go ahead and play around with
different letter substitutions to see if you can track down your ancestors in
newspapers when you previously thought there were no articles for them. The next
thing you're going to want to try is cluster research, cluster research is
when you are researching a cluster of individuals maybe a group of people who
were in the Eastern Star Association. You know your grandmother
was part of the Eastern Star, but you also knew a couple other club members so
by searching for those club members you might find articles about your
grandmother because the OCR couldn't pick up her name, but it's sitting there
in the newspaper. You can also look for other family members sometimes the
article for a different family member will lead you to an article that has all
of the family members in it. And you definitely want to look for friends when
you see people serving together in different organizations maybe their
neighbours, Witnesses on common documents, then you want to go search for those
people in newspapers and see if your ancestor pops up there in a newspaper
clipping about their friends and it happens to name them as well. So in this
case you may be looking for Charles Lee Miliey or Miles, it's really hard to read,
and do you know that John Henry Martin is often in association with them
they're friends. So be sure to check out cluster research.
The next method is the Stumbleupon method, um now Elissa Scalise Powell says
that hope is not a research strategy, but sometimes you'll find some really cool
articles because you go into the newspaper looking for one thing
and because you take time to read some of the other articles that appear on the
page you might find some extra details about people you weren't searching for
at that moment but they're part of your overall research plan so let's take a look.
So again let's say we were looking for this article about Mrs. Alexander B
Huston or Huston and you just happen to see a name over here on this side this
name right here Mrs. D E G I S C E R Degisher, well maybe you knew
that these two people were related or connected or maybe it happens to be that
Mrs. Alexander she was on one branch of your tree and then Degischer
was on the other branch of your tree and you were reading the news from the town
that you're researching in and happened to pick up both branches from the same
day in the same newspaper. Now the next strategy of OCR workarounds is to just
read everything. Maybe you're looking for your ancestors obituary and you know
when they died and you just start reading all of the obituaries that
happens within a couple of weeks after your ancestors death it's worth a try,
have fun. I'm not particularly gonna do it unless there's a serious brick wall
that I'm trying to break down and I haven't solved any other problems,
but don't discount that sometimes you just have to read. You can scan and
browse and things of that nature but sometimes you can't get around the OCR
you just have to read. Now if you're unwilling to read everything of the
time and place your ancestors lived then you're gonna have to come to terms with
the fact that you're gonna miss out on some cool discoveries. So instead why
don't you search for low-hanging fruit look for just birth, marriag, and death
announcements as well as maybe some land transfers and probate announcements
other than that you're probably just gonna leave the rest of the newspaper
alone. So I hope this strategy which of searching for clusters using OCR
substitution or my previous video of searching for keywords helps you find
really great stories in newspapers. But my question of the day is this how do
you get around OCR problems in newspapers? I loved in our community that
we can learn together so share your tips. Once again I'm Devin Noel Lee with Family
History Fanatics to watch more videos about newspapers check here and to find
our latest video check here.