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It makes perfect sense because of all the immigrants that came in through the port of New York via Ellis Island. That, of course, wasn’t the only port for our immigrant ancestors, but certainly an important one. New York also being an early settlement, means many of our trails will lead back to that state.
There was a post recently on Facebook from Kenneth R. Marks who writes The Ancestor Hunt website and blog and has his Facebook site by the same name, click here for the link.
On January 15th he posted an article listing all the sites to find newspaper articles from New York. There are over 1,000 FREE links for the state of New York. Yes, FREE.
Here’s the link to that list New York Online Newspaper Summary
I’ve used the first collection, Old Fulton New York Postcards-Hidden Gems, extensively and wrote a blog post about using that particular site. I’ve found dozens are newspaper articles and obituaries for my family. However, I wasn’t aware of the many other sites to find my New York ancestors in newspapers.
As an example, using The Ancestor Hunt website, I selected Erie Buffalo NY Courier 1888-1926 to search for my husband’s family, the Finks or Dollers. When I clicked on the link this is what I found.
(CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT)
I selected the very first icon for the 1888 edition. What I see next is this.
It appears, as I click on each of these icons, that this is the complete scanned version of this newspaper, page by page. The third PDF icon led me to page 1 of the August 26, 1888 edition. I used CNTRL F to try a search on the page and found out these images have been OCR’d. Therefore, a search is possible.
It is certainly a slow process, if you are going to search each and every page of a particular edition. Sometimes this may be necessary. However, using the methods I displayed in my blog post, going directly to the Old Fulton Postcard website directly, is much more efficient. In doing a search directly on that site this morning, I located a death notice for my husband’s great grandmother from 1950.
Here’s a close up of Bertha’s name. This shows us the month, the date and the place of her death. Oct. 6, in Alden.
As you can see and probably already know, newspapers are one of our best sources for finding information on our ancestors. Whether it’s the date & place of their death, their marriage, a business they may have owned, a lawsuit they were involved in, an accident or the birth of a child, newspapers were the social media of the day.
I’d love to hear about how newspapers have assisted you with your ancestor’s stories.
Happy hunting,
Michigan Girl
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