New digitized historical newspapers now online for Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Tennessee. Also the British Military Register, UK Suffragette Newspaper Collection, and papers for Nottingham, South London, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Leicestershire and North Yorkshire, England. We report two success stories from using these weekly Friday reports—what successes could YOU have?
I love this email that Lisa Louise Cooke received recently: “Hi Lisa, I just want to thank you for your weekly updates of new record sources. A couple of weeks ago you sent a link for the Illinois State University newspaper archive. Being my dad’s alma mater, I searched for him. A handful of stories came up about when my dad was almost kicked out of school and how his fellow students came to his rescue by staging a sit-in to prevent that. He’d had some minor infraction with a housing rule. I had forgotten that my dad had told me about it. I only wish he was still alive for me to share these articles with him. Thank you so much!” – Sara
We love hearing about your discoveries in our weekly Friday record posts! Below, we’re reporting more historical newspapers that might be just what you need to read. I’ve included two news articles I found about my own family, too.
New digitized historical newspapers: Free collections
Colorado. TheColorado Historic Newspapers Collectionis a fantastic (and free) collection of digitized newspapers that you shouldn’t miss if your family lived in The Centennial State. I know this because I have discovered absolute gems here about my Felix great-grandparents during the few years they lived in Hugo, Colorado. Here are two of my favorite articles. The first is a fascinating glimpse into how novel and exciting it was to make a long-distance call. The second is a moving sale notice: a harbinger of change for the family, which was about to leave behind its horse-breeding business and move to the city of Pueblo.
The site recently reported a new addition to the site:The Altrurian, covering Piñon, a town in the Tabequache Park in southwestern Colorado. According to the site, “This title is especially unique not only because it began publication even before the community it represented even existed, but also because it further adds to the narrative of communal or ‘Utopian’ societies that gained a relatively significant following in the late 19th century in Colorado.”
Georgia. The Digital Library of Georgia’sblogrecently announced “the availability of theRed and Black in the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive….Since 1893, the Red and Black has provided a training ground for University of Georgia students interested in gaining experience in various aspects of newspaper publishing and to produce a high quality daily newspaper for the University of Georgia community.” The paper is published in Athens, GA, and is the state’s most widely-circulated college newspaper.
Now online at Newspapers.com
SE Iowa and NW Illinois: theQuad-City Times, published in Davenport, with coverage beginning in 1855.
Newspapers.com has also updated dozens of newspaper collections across the U.S. and for England, Canada, Australia, Scotland, Ireland and more.Click hereto explore their newspaper holdings for your ancestral hometown.
Over 5000 pages of a new British military newspaper. The Military Registerdates back to the late Georgian period and covers contemporary reports from the Napoleonic Wars, the East India Company and more.
More than 30 years of coverage to theNottingham Journal, a collection that now totals nearly 200,000 pages and spans a full century (1811-1912, some years missing) of everyday life “in the Queen of the Midlands.”
MoreCambridgeshire newspaper pages, which now number over 14,000 and date back to the 1700s. There are several titles for Cambridge, Huntington, March, and Wisbech.
Votes for Women. This paper joins the growing Suffragette Newspaper Collection. They now have 14 papers in the collection—we haven’t been able to report each one of them—and will continue to add to it this centenary year.Click hereto read about suffragette newspaper and other records now online at the BNA’s sister site, Findmypast.com.
More than a half-century of coverage to theCroydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, both South London titles. This paper’s online pages now number over 21,000 and span 1855-1912.
Here’s hoping these new digitized historical newspapers lead you to some family history gems, too! If the times and places we’ve covered today don’t include your family, don’t despair. Instead, click here to browse more of our Friday record posts. You’ll likely find something worth exploring. (Will you post a comment if you do? We’d love to hear!)
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!
See if you can find U.S. ancestors using these new online resources (many of them free!): U.S. Supreme Court cases; an African American research guide; newspapers serving Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina and Texas; orphan train riders and Rhode Island burials since 1647. Also, your help is requested to help build an important database of African American soldiers in the Civil War.
Featured collection: U.S. Supreme Court cases
“More than 225 years of Supreme Court decisions acquired by the Library of Congress are now publicly available online – free to access in a page image format for the first time,” reported a recent Library of Congresspress release. “The Library has made available more than 35,000 cases that were published in the printed bound editions of United States Reports (U.S. Reports).”
This collection is comprised of “official reports of decisions for the United States Supreme Court dating to the court’s first decision in 1791 and to earlier courts that preceded the Supreme Court in the colonial era,” or in other words, cases originally published in bound volumes 1-542. “This collection of Supreme Court cases is fully searchable. Filters allow users to narrow their searches by date, name of the justice authoring the opinion, subject and by the main legal concepts at issue in each case. PDF versions of individual cases can be viewed and downloaded.” We noticed this in a tweet from The Legal Genealogist Judy Russell, who makes a case for the genealogical value of Supreme Court cases inthis articleon her blog.
Find US ancestors in more new online resources
A new African American research guide
The Maryland State Archives has published a new guide, Researching African American Families at the Maryland State Archives.(Clicking on the link will take you directly to a PDF version of the guide). The introduction states, “A strong tradition of record keeping from the earliest days of settlement has resulted in the preservation of a vast amount of material relevant to African American history. This material can be found primarily at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, where the permanent public records of state, county, and local agencies are conveniently centralized. Records concerning African Americans, once neglected by professional historians and genealogists alike, provide new insights into the Maryland experience for people of color.”
Even if your African American roots are not in Maryland (or if your Maryland roots are not African American), you can still likely learn about important record types and research tips!
African American Civil War Soldiers Database
TheAfrican American Civil War Soldiers projectrecently launched an effort to build “a comprehensive database of the estimated 200,000 soldiers who formed the United States Colored Troops” during the Civil War. According to the website, this project aims “to improve our knowledge of the African Americans who fought for freedom in the American Civil War, to provide descendants of the soldiers with access to information on their ancestors, and to present students of history with primary documents from a pivotal moment in African American history.”
Volunteers are requested to help transcribe “images of the soldiers’ military service records, which have been photographed and scanned by the National Archives and Records Administration and Fold3. From these, we are collecting detailed individual information such as name, age, height, place of birth and enlistment, as well as evidence of battles fought, injuries and causalities sustained, and honors and promotions won.”
It’s easy to start transcribing: there’s no software to download or learn, and you don’t even need to register. If you click “Get started,” you’ll be taken directly to an image to transcribe (a quick series of pop-up screens will give you a quick orientation about the type of document you’ll be transcribing and how to do it). The example shown below comes from a “Company Descriptive Book, the first card in each soldier’s file. This card contains information on the soldier’s origins and enlistment.”
North Carolina. Digital NC continues to post new, free newspaper content on its site. Recent additions include the weeklyThe Hertford County Herald(Ahoskie, NC) for 1914-1923; More issues of theWatauga Democrat (Boone, NC, serving the western part of the state; coverage now spans 1923-1963); and theCherokee Scout(Cherokee County)—now with nearly 2,500 issues from 1923-1971.
Texas.The Portal of Texas Historywebsite is adding more free newspaper content: the Cleveland Advocate and its sister publications, Dayton News and Eastex Advocate, and two other defunct newspapers – Illustrated Paperboy and Cleveland Journal. Anews reportdescribes the Portal of Texas History as “a gateway to Texas’s earliest history with newspapers dating back to 1829, seven years before Texas became a republic,” with 5.7 million individual newspaper pages, and “the largest single-state free digital repository in the nation for newspapers.”
Orphan Train riders
A new collection at subscription giant Ancestry.com,New York, Orphans Placed in the New York Foundling Hospital and Children’s Aid Society, 1855-1925, gathers the names of nearly 18,000 poor, abandoned or orphaned children who were placed under the care of New York City orphanages and eventually shipped to families in the western United States to be adopted. These children are popularly known as “orphan train” riders. According to the collection description, “Information as to the identities of a large number of these children has been preserved in federal and state censuses taken between 1855 and 1925, as well as in the 1890 New York City police census, and represents a potential boon to the descendants of these foundlings. This collection contains a two-volume work that encompasses the “Orphan Train Riders” from NYFH.” Tip: Have fun learning the stories of some of these children inOrphan Trainby Christina Baker Kline, a NYT best-selling novel and a Genealogy Gems Book Club pick.
Rhode Island burials
The New England Historic Genealogical Society has announced a new database on its subscription website, AmericanAncestors.org.Rhode Island: Historical Cemeteries, 1647-2000“includes 450,000 individuals buried in Rhode Island,” states a company email. “More than 900,000 names transcribed from tombstones are included. This database provides tombstone transcriptions, and birth and death records. Some entries include tombstone images and GPS coordinates.” The project is part of a volunteer-driven collaboration with the Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project.
Find US ancestors in more new online collections
Did you miss these recent announcements about US records that are new online? Check them out!
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!
The New York State Death Index (1880-1956) is online for the first time! Also: letters of complaints to the city of Sydney, Australia; marriage records for Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Washington; and the newspaper of a historically black North Carolina university. Coming soon: a major new online archive for Ontario, Canada.
Featured: New York State Death Index
For the first time, the New York State Death Index (1880-1956) has been made available online–and it’s free! The nonprofit advocacy group Reclaim the Records won its case that this index should be made available as free public records. According to the organization’s announcement, the index isn’t completely statewide: New York City death records were maintained separately, and Yonkers, Buffalo and Albany are not included until 1914 or 1915. The index for 1880 and 1881 is sparse, as record-keeping wasn’t good yet, and the index for 1943 is difficult to read. And it’s unclear whether those who died at some state institutions were included. The link above takes you to each year’s index on Internet Archive.
Australia: Complaints to the City of Sydney
Over 56,000 letters written by residents to the City of Sydney in the latter part of the 1800s have been digitized and added to the City of Sydney Archive online. A city historian quoted at the Daily Telegraph.com said people’s complaints “range from the mundane to the bizarre,” such as “foul smells, night time noise, stray farm animals and smoke billowing from homes and blacksmiths’ forges.” This same online city archive also hosts a collection of historical photographs, a full run of Sands directories, postal directories, and other resources for researching your house history. Find this collection by clicking Archives Investigator and then “Letters Received by Council, 1843-1899.”
Canada: New Ontario collections planned
Findmypast and the Ontario Genealogical Society have announced a new partnership that will bring millions of Ontario records online. According to a Findmypast announcement, “The first phase will be launched later this year with the online publication of over six million fascinating Ontario records, including:
The Ontario Name Index (TONI) – over 3.7 million records – a mega-index of names with the goal of including every name found in any publication relating to Ontario, ranging from registers of birth, marriage & death to obituaries, memorial inscriptions, newspaper articles and more.
The Ontario Genealogical Society Provincial Index (OGSPI) – over 2.6 million records – containing data from censuses, birth, marriage and death registers, references in books, land records, passenger lists, military records and a host of other references.
Oddfellows Life Insurance Applications (1875-1929) – over 240,000 names released online for the very first time, containing a collection of just over 59,000 life insurance applications to the Odd-Fellows’ Relief Association of Canada. The applications contain answers to up to thirty-one questions about sex, age, occupation, height, weight, ethnic origins, marital status, family structure, and past and present health conditions.
Ontario Genealogical Society Bulletin/Families and NewsLeaf – new images from official society publications and journals will become available to search through Findmypast’s Periodical Source Index (PERSI) – the largest subject index to genealogy and local history periodical articles in the world.”
Stay tuned to the Genealogy Gems blog for an announcement when the collections are available.
US: North Carolina university newspaper
Several issues of the student newspaper for Johnson C. Smith University are now online at DigitalNC. “Johnson C Smith University, a historically black university in Charlotte, NC was founded in 1867 as the Biddle Memorial Institute,” explains a Digital North Carolina blog post. “The name was changed to Johnson C Smith University in 1923 after a benefactress’ husband, shortly before the available run of papers were published.” Online editions span 1926 – 1930.
Marriage record example from “Nebraska Marriage Records, 1855-1906” on Ancestry.com. Click to view.
US: Marriage records: NE, WA, IN, IA
Ancestry.com has published a new index of Nebraska, Marriage Records, 1855-1908 with over 1.4 million records. It includes indexed images of records that generally include the couple’s names, birthdates, birthplaces, parents’ names and date and place of the wedding. Also new on Ancestry.com is Washington, State Marriage Indexes, 1969-2014, described as “a statewide index to over 3.9 million marriages that were performed in Washington between 1969 and 2014.” It includes only the names of the couple, date of the wedding, and county.
The site has also recently updated marriage records collections for the states of Indiana, Iowa and an update to Washington, Marriage Records, 1854-2013, described as “images of and indexes extracted from various records of marriages in Washington” from the state archive (and, with over 10.5 million records, likely overlaps with the above new collection).
Thanks for helping us spread the word about new genealogy records online! Just share this post with your genealogy buddies and fellow society members. You’re a gem!
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We think this week’s list of new and updated genealogical records is really the cat’s meow! WorldCat gets a major addition to their database that is going to help make strides in researching ancestors from Quebec. Search the Irish black sheep in the family and dive into records for Middlesex, European soldiers of WWI, and a helpful record collection for Iowa ancestors!
WorldCat
WorldCat is a catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. If you have a book or publication that you are dying to get a hold of, you can use World Cat to track it down. Using a title or keywords you are interested in, World Cat will locate where the closest copy of a book, DVD, CD, or article, for you to view. Isn’t that wonderful?
Many genealogists use World Cat and we have some exciting news. 2.4 million new records have been added by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) to the WorldCat database. This mega contribution is dedicated to those records from Quebec or those that relate to Quebec.
To learn more about and search WorldCat, click here. And then take a few minutes to watch Lisa’s interview with Jay Jordan, President & CEO of OCLC about the collaboration between OCLC and FamilySearch to bring better acess to records and resources to everyone.
Ireland – Outrage Reports
What’s an outrage report? This new collection at Findmypast consists of thousands of reports created by the Royal Irish Constabulary between 1836 and 1840. Outrage reports were created by chief constables who were responsible for writing a short summary of all incidents, crimes, or disturbances that occurred within their county.
The original records are held at the National Archives in London. These historic Irish reports include descriptions of thefts, assaults, suicides, rescues, cases of infanticide, arson, and more. Each record includes both a transcript and digital image of the original document. Images of the original documents contain a short description of the event or offence reported or the details of the crime committed, so reader beware. If you have a black sheep in the family, you might want to take a look at this special collection.
United Kingdom – Middlesex – Court Records
Another new collection at Findmypast is titled “Middlesex, London, Old Bailey Court records, 1674-1913.” This collection holds over 782,000 court records from London’s Old Bailey. Old Bailey was the central criminal court of England and Wales. Within this collection, you will find both transcripts and links to images of the original documents. Criminal proceedings and biographies of executed criminals is just the tip of the iceberg, so you’ll want to start digging today!
United Kingdom – WWI War Diaries
Fold3.com announced their new database collection “UK WWI War Diaries.” These diaries are unit diaries. They cover operations and movements for the British and colonial united who served between 1914 and 1920 in France, Belgium, and Germany, as well as in Gallipoli/Dardanelles Campaign.
The diaries are separated into two titles: UK, WWI War Diaries (France, Belgium, and Germany) and UK, WWI Diaries (Gallipoli-Dardanelles.) These diaries are a daily record of events and some diaries contain more information than you might expect. You may even be able to find supplemental documents too. This collection is organized by regiment, division, and then sub-unit. Remember, these are typically handwritten records. You may want to browse the records one-by-one to make sure your search is not in vain.
Though these are not personal diaries, you may find your ancestor listed by name. It is always more meaningful to learn of our ancestors in these ways. To learn of the conditions, their movements, their gains and their losses, can paint a more realistic story of their time in WWI.
United States – Iowa – State Census
State censuses are unique. They were usually taken on the 5’s, like in 1885, 1895, or 1905, etc. Iowa is one of my favorite states to research in because of their state census records. If you have Iowa ancestors, you will love the 1905 Iowa State Census now available to search for free at FamilySearch.org.
The 1905 census asked similar questions to those asked in many of the U.S. Federal Censuses, such as name, age, and place of birth. This census also asked how long they had lived in the U.S. and how long they had lived in Iowa. This is particularly helpful when determining if an immigrant ancestor came “straight to Iowa,” or may have resided in another area for a time.
This census also includes signatures of those enumerated which is a neat piece of memorabilia to have for one of your kindred dead.
Every Friday, we highlight new genealogy records online. Scan these posts for content that may include your ancestors. Use these records to inspire your search for similar records elsewhere. Always check our Google tips at the end of each list: they are custom-crafted each week to give YOU one more tool in your genealogy toolbox.
IOWA HISTORICAL JOURNALS. The State Historical Society of Iowa has posted back issues of The Annals of Iowa dating to 1863. This is a quarterly, peer-reviewed historical journal. Use the search box to see whether your Iowa ancestors, hometowns or other family connections (schools, churches, friends, etc) are mentioned in more than 150 years’ worth of articles.
RUSSIAN WWII SOLDIERS. According to this article, “Thanks to a new online state initiative, families of Russian WWII combatants…are now able to give their forebears the recognition they deserve, 70 years on. The Zvyezdy Pobedy project, organized by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, allows the descendants of those who fought in the Red Army in WWII to find out whether their ancestors were among the recipients of over 38 million orders and medals awarded during the war….There are more than 8,200 names listed in the database, which can be read in Russian at rg.ru/zvezdy_pobedy.”
U.S. CIVIL WAR RECORDS. These aren’t new, necessarily, but until April 30, Civil War records on Fold3 are FREE to search! Among the 43 million items are (of course!) military records, personal accounts, historic writings, photographs and maps. Both Union and Confederate records are represented.
Google tip of the week: Need to read web text in Russian or another language you don’t know? Use Google Translate to translate short passages or even entire webpages! Copy text or a URL (for full page translation) into the left box, then click English and Translate on the right. You can even play back an audio version of the foreign text to hear how it sounds! Learn more in Lisa Louise Cooke’s The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox. The 2nd edition, newly published in 2015, is fully revised and updated with the best Google has to offer–which is a LOT.
WorldCat
