Genealogical research in newspapers runs the gamut from birth to death with everything in between up for grabs, marriages, divorces, desertions, bed and board notices, adoptions, etc. Reading the newspaper for an area of interest gives tons of details of local lives in addition to the all important flavor or the town.
Information contained in newspaper articles is endless and includes:
- Deaths
- Funerals
- Births
- Adoptions
- Marriages
- Wedding Announcements
- Wills
- Divorces
- Desertions
- Bed and Board Notices
- Administrator’s Notice
- Estate Sales
- Accidents
- Hotel registers
- Golden wedding anniversaries
- Epidemics
- Arrests
- Floods
- Life Insurance Payouts
- Surprise birthday parties
- Fires
- Deans’ lists
- Trips
- Moving sales
- Reunions
- Teacher lists
- Enlistments
- Partnership dissolutions
- Hospital admissions
- Flitting day moves
- Confirmations
- Migrations
- Graduations
- Visits
- Unclaimed letters
- Vacations
- Disasters
- Political news
- Weather
All types of articles can give body to otherwise bare skeletons of lives of ancestors. Placing an ancestor in a specific time and place, with or without a family, can corroborate whether or not there was a family. Pennsylvania and New York started keeping marriage records as a civil registration requirement in the late 1880s. Newspapers can narrow down that marriage date, with an article containing a list of teachers, since those women would be unmarried. Married women could not be teachers.
Advertisements, while not news articles, can shed enormous light onto what was important, what was necessary, and what was new, in a specific place and time period. Photographs of people, even though not related to the research subjects, can help date by fashion and style, photographs you have in your possession. Just as Dear Abby, Ann Landers and Emily Post’s columns open windows into issues of their day, so can the help columns of the time.
