Video #3 of our 25 Websites for Genealogy – Newspapers!
VIDEO & SHOW NOTES: Video #3 of our 25 Websites for Genealogy Playlist. In this video, my guest presenter Gena Philibert-Ortega covers digitzed newspaper websites that are must-haves for family history research. Even though some sound specific to a certain area, don’t be fooled. They have resources available for all genealogists including even more than newspapers.
Websites 13 through 17 of our 25 Websites for Genealogy
Some of these websites will be new to you, and others are going to be very familiar to you. In talking about the familiar websites, I want to get you thinking about them differently, explain a little bit more about what you can do at these websites, and how to get the most out of them.
In this series of 25 Websites for Genealogy, we’re going to be looking at websites in different categories. Our third category is the newspaper websites (#13 through 17).
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Websites #13: Newspapers.com
Newspapers.com is a subscription service owned by Ancestry.com. The two websites are connected so that you can attach your Newspapers.com finds to your Ancestry tree. Newspapers.com includes newspapers found at Ancestry but all newly newspaper pages are added to Newspapers.com. They also offer a Publisher’s Extra subscription that expands your access to additional newspaper records.
Learn more:
- Newspapers.com – Finding Family Recipes
- Newspapers.com – Reconstructing Your Ancestor’s Life
- Newspapers.com – Digging Deeper (Premium)
Website #14: GenealogyBank
Website #15: NewspaperArchive
NewspaperArchive includes digitized newspapers from around the world.
Website #16: Chronicling America
Original Website: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
New website: https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america
The Library of Congress offers this huge free collection of digitized newspapers from across the United States. The papers range from 1756 to 1963. Expand your search with the U.S. Newspaper Directory 1690 to present.

The new user interface at Chronicling America.
Website #17: Fulton History
Fultonhistory.com features over 1,000 New York newspapers, plus newspapers from other states and Canada. It’s a vast free collection curated by one man!
Resources:
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New Records Include Irish Genealogical Abstracts
Explore new Irish Genealogical Abstracts that have become available this week. They are a great alternative to records destroyed in the 1922 Dublin fire! Also new are church and burial records for England, poorhouse records for Scotland, German military recruitment, documents, and colonial letters for Australia. Finally, a variety of exciting collections are now online for the U.S. for Massachusetts, New Mexico, Georgia, and more!
Irish Genealogical Abstracts
New this week at Findmypast are several genealogical abstract collections! First is the Thrift Irish Genealogical Abstracts, created by renowned Irish genealogist Gertrude Thrift. This collection features copies of wills, bill books, parish registers, commission books, and freeman lists, as well as detailed family trees and pedigree charts. Records in this collection date as far back as the 16th century and up to the early 20th century.
Next is the Crossle Irish Genealogical Abstracts collection. Explore the various notebooks of 19th-century genealogists Dr. Francis Crossle and Philip Crossle to reveal a wealth of Irish genealogical resources including copies of records destroyed in the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922.
Finally, the Betham Irish Genealogical Abstracts features abstracts and genealogical sketches created by herald Sir William Betham, the Ulster King of Arms. The notebooks are an excellent substitute for missing records and include abstracts of wills, reconstructed family trees, and detailed pedigrees.
Also new for Irish genealogy this week is the Cork, Pobble O’Keefe Census 1830-1852. Search these records to discover who your ancestor was living with as well as their occupation, birth year and marital status.
Findmypast is the leader in genealogical records for Ireland, the UK, and now including U.S. and Canada. Get a two-week free trial of their premium subscription and explore millions of Irish record and more! Click here to subscribe now.
England Parish Records
Extracted Church of England Parish Records, 1538-1837 for Nottingham, England are now available online at Ancestry.com. The records include baptisms/christenings, burials, marriages, tombstone inscriptions, obituaries, tax lists, wills, and other miscellaneous types of records.
Over 75,000 records have been added to Findmypast’s collection of Yorkshire Burials, covering Anglican parishes and municipal cemeteries. Find your ancestor’s name, age at death and burial place, with more than 4 million records covering over 400 years.
Scottish Poorhouse Records
New for Scotland are Kirkcaldy, Fife, Poorhouse Records, 1888-1912. This collection includes records for those who received help from the Abden Home Poor Law Institution, originally named the Kirkcaldy Combination Poorhouse.
German Military Records
Halle(Saale), Military Recruitment Lists, 1828-1888 are now online at Ancestry.com.
From the collection description: “These recruitment lists are arranged in chronological-alphabetical order and contain detailed information about male military personnel in the city. Typically records for young men begin at age 20. Therefore this collection includes age groupings for men born beginning in 1808 up to and including 1868.”
Australia – New South Wales
At Ancestry.com, you can now explore the New South Wales, Colonial Secretary’s Letters, 1826-1856 collection. If you had ancestors living there during that time period, you can find a wealth of information in this collection, including petitions by convicts for sentence mitigation, marriage permission requests, character memorials for potential settlers, land grant or lease applications, official visit reports, information about court cases, and lists of assigned servants.
United States – Maps & More
Confederate Maps. The Cartographic Branch of the National Archives has announced the digitization of over 100 Confederate maps from Record Group (RG) 109. All are now available to view or download through their online catalog. “These maps can include rough sketches created quickly before or during a battle, but can also include maps that were drawn to accompany official reports or even post-war publications. Many are highly detailed and colorized.”
Massachusetts. At AmericanAncestors.org (the website of the New England Historic Genealogical Society), 12 new volumes have been added to the parish of Immaculate Conception in Salem to Massachusetts collection, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Records, 1789-1900. This update consists of 23,972 records and roughly 90,300 names.
New Mexico. Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Marriage Index, 1888-2017 are now available online at Ancestry.com. The original records come from Bernalillo County Record’s Office, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Georgia. From a recent press release: The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is celebrating its 1 millionth digitized historic newspaper page. The premier issue of the Georgia Gazette, Georgia’s first newspaper, published from 1763-1776 in Savannah, will become the 1 millionth page of historic newspapers to be made freely available online through the Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN).
Colorado. Also celebrating a 1 million milestone is the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC), from the Colorado Virtual Library. The millionth page came from the Montrose Daily Press, Volume XII, Number 247, April 21, 1921, which is part of a digitization project supported by Montrose Regional Library District.
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BYU Family History Conference 2016
The BYU family history conference is coming up July 26-29, 2016 in Provo, Utah. I’ll be there! Will you? I hope you’ll come say hello.
I hope to meet many of you at Brigham Young University’s annual Conference on Family History and Genealogy in Provo, Utah, coming up on July 26-29, 2016.They’re keeping me busy during the first two days of the conference, when I will be teaching five lectures! Those presentations will include:
- Genealogical Time Travel: Google Earth is Your DeLorean. Get ready to experience old historic maps, genealogical records, images, and videos coming together to create stunning time travel experiences in the free Google Earth program. We’ll incorporate automated changing boundaries, and uncover historic maps that are built right into Google Earth. Tell time travel stories that will truly excite your non-genealogist relatives! You’ve never seen anything like this class!
- Get the Scoop on Your Ancestors with Newspapers. Yearning to “read all about it?” Newspapers are a fantastic source of research leads, information and historical context for your family history. Learn the specialized approach that is required to achieve success in locating the news on your ancestors. Includes 3 Cool Tech Tools that will get you started.
- Google Tools & Procedures for Solving Family History Mysteries. In this session we will put Google to the test. Discover Google tools and the process for using them to solve the genealogical challenges you face. You’ll walk away with exciting new techniques you can use right away.
- Soothe Your Tech Tummy Ache with These 10 Tech Tools. Are you sick and tired of navigating the countless tech tools available to help with your family history? The good news: You don’t need them all to accomplish your genealogy goals. The video session will soothe your suffering by simply focusing on these 10 technology tools that will help you bypass tech overload and get back to your genealogy research.
- Tablet and Smartphone Tricks, Tips and Apps. Tablets and smartphones are built for hitting the road and are ideally suited for genealogy due to their sleek size, gorgeous graphics and myriad of apps and tools. In this class you will discover the top apps and best practices that will make your mobile device a genealogical powerhouse! (iOS and Android)
WHAT: Brigham Young University Conference on Family History & Genealogy
WHEN: July 26-29, 2016
WHERE: BYU Conference Center, 730 East University Pkwy, Provo, UT
REGISTER: Click here for full conference information
Gems editor Sunny Morton will join me at the BYU family history conference in the vendor hall and in the classroom. She’ll be lecturing on researching collateral relatives (as indirect routes to direct ancestors); finding “relatively recent” 20th-century relatives; finding family history in Catholic church records; how to carefully consider your sources; and a hands-on workshop for planning your next family history writing project.
This year’s conference promises to be rich in expertise and education. Keynote speakers include FamilySearch CEO Steve Rockwood and professional genealogist and author, Paul Milner. There are more than 100 classes planned in several topic areas. ICAPGen will host a luncheon, too. A nice extra is that the conference center is so easy to get around in, with free parking right next to the building.
Click here to learn more about the conference and register. And please come say hello to me and Sunny at the Genealogy Gems booth in the exhibit hall on Wednesday or Thursday!
The BYU Family History Conference 2015
Last year, I delivered gave a keynote address on various technologies that help our research. It reminds me how quickly technology moves–and how enthusiastically genealogists continue to embrace new opportunities given them by technology. Click here to read a summary of that talk and whet your appetite for this year’s conference!