are you ready to do some more great things over on newspapers.com to find your ancestors. Yay
because today we're going to talk about some advanced searches strategies that you can try
on newspapers.com. Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics and I like helping you
find your family and build your family tree. The first thing I want you to do
is I want you to try to search for initials. I told you before that you should probably
look for surnames. And surnames only sometimes you need to go in and throw in some names. And it's
actually better if you do initials with a name because Robert isn't always going to translate
into an R. So let's look for R. P. Sparks. An R. P. Sparks has over nine million matches. So
what I need to do is narrow it down by location and I'm going to narrow it down by Ohio.
And now I only have 150 000 R. P. Sparks. And now I'm going to narrow it down by year and I
can come down here and I can narrow it down. And let's say I'm looking for, mostly, in the 1920s
and 30s.
And in Newark Ohio, I find misters R. P. Sparks, D. M. Brombach, Carl Dumen, and they are all
in an entertaining class. Sadly it's really hard to read that article but that's how you
go about looking for a newspaper article using initials. So my next tip is to search beyond
your hometown. Now some articles are going to be in different home newspapers because their
the news service will pick it up on the wire and then go print it in their newspaper.
The other thing that can happen is that your ancestor
may go somewhere else. So they may go visit a family member. They may be part of a sports
team and they go to a tournament in another location. So the tip is to search beyond your
hometown. Now I find this works best with less common names. So I'm just gonna do something fun
and type in my grandfather's name now what I find fascinating is that my grandfather was really from
Ohio and there's only 118 matches but the first hint is in Vermont and Tampa and New York and
Florida. And what I'm really seeing right now is that Robert Geiszler is not uncommon as I thought.
But I'm going to try and show you an example of what it really means to look beyond your location.
So I'm going to do George Carlsberger and I see Delphos Ohio, Akron Ohio, Hillsborough Ohio,
Portsmouth, Dayton napoleon. Now if I take off the restriction to Ohio,
actually I added it, you see there's one match in Missouri. Why is it showing up in Missouri?
well, it's because he was a bomb-thrower. So the more sensational a headline the more likely
that newspaper item is to make it around the world.
So you want to go ahead and do some investigation but if we go back to that newspaper entry,
you're going to see it's from Columbus Ohio, even though the newspaper is in ST Louis Missouri.
So search beyond your hometown. Sometimes articles are word for word the same across
the different papers but it's fun to see how far the article reaches around the world.
You should probably ask Andy sometime just how far around the world did James Garnett get with his
prison story. Now the next tip is to search within a county. Now, how are you going to do that? well
let's go ahead and do a basic search once again and this time we're going to do Peter Sparks.
Now Peter Sparks is from Ohio and I'm not entirely sure what papers serve his counties
but right here you can see Hamilton Montgomery, Summer Richland Marion, and here's Licking County.
Yay! So that helps a lot. And I can find a death claims transfer. I like when you can
really see what it is in the little thumbnail. I'm going to blow this one up and this is
Robinson P. Sparks to Forest John. And Peter Sparks to Roosevelt Huge. They're actually
the exact same person. But sometimes his official name is Robinson and sometimes he goes by Peter.
Now for some other tips on how to search by county there's a really old, a great oldie, but goody
article over on the newspapers.com blog called fishrap. And I'll link to that in the description.
So my final advance tip is to stop searching and start browsing there are sometimes when you
can't find what you're looking for because the ocr makes it impossible to read an article. But how do
you go about actually browsing a newspaper? so browsing is really easy. Click on browse
and now you can filter down. And for the fun of it I'm going to see what's available in Ontario
Canada. So I'm going to click on Canada and Ontario. Now I have Ottawa, Toronto,
and Windsor. So I'm going to go ahead and click on winter and I'm going to click a year and a month.
And now I can get to the issue. Let's just see what's happening Saturday night in Goodall,
Windsor, on tana Ontario, Canada. It's zoomed in way way way far which makes it easier to read
some great articles. Our noble queen has reigned for 50 years
and now you can just kind of zoom in and out and browse and see what's going on telegraphic
benefits. So you can search page by page looking for notices and items of interest
here is one that says notice to creditors notice given and pursuant to section 36 having claims
against the estate of James Rice Slate of the city of Windsor who died on or about 18th of November
1895. So maybe that you were looking for anything about your ancestors honor about 1896 in January
and you stumble upon that notice that she hadn't anticipated and that paper was kind of blurry.
So perhaps ocr didn't pick it up. So that's how you browse. I actually didn't include all of what
it took to find that particular article through browsing but you just turn page by page and then
you go through the process of reading the news and look for things that
could be about your ancestors. And along the way pay attention to the ads and the other items
there. So those are the tips I have to help you get more out of your newspapers.com subscription.
Before you go be sure you hit that subscribe button like this video and sign up for the
newsletters. So if you need to learn more about how to use newspapers.com be sure to check out
the playlist right up here. And if you're ready for something new try out this video right here.