Filling in the Blanks with Historical Newspapers

One of my favorite resources for genealogical information is historic newspapers. I'm fortunate to live near the largest collection of historic Missouri newspapers on microfilm, the Newspaper Library at the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Although I usually have some specific articles on my list to look for when I visit the Newspaper Library, I can still spend hours just browsing the pages on microfilm.

Not only do newspapers contain birth, marriage and death information -- the facts and figures that are the bones our databases are built on -- but they give us much more. Newspaper articles add so much color to the otherwise drab facts and figures of our research. Reading about the various travels, births, sales of property, scuffles in the town square, reports of local men at war, etc. transforms my project from strictly "genealogy" to "family history."

Having easy access to all of these Missouri newspapers just whets my appetite for similar information on the ancestors who lived other states. And although it's great to be able to view them on microfilm, this is the digital age -- I want to be able to view pages from old newspapers on my computer from the comfort of home! I'm not asking much, am I? (She smiles.)

Well obviously, I'm not the first to wish for such convenience. Ancestry.com includes an historic newspaper collection in their subscription, and both GenealogyBank and NewspaperArchive also give you access (for a fee)to various newspapers from the past. It turns out that there are numerous other websites that give free digital access to historic newspapers. Still thinking about Missouri, one of my favorites is the Missouri Historical Newspaper Project.

I did a quick google-search (using the terms: historic newspapers free digital images) and found a few websites that contain lists of places that you can find such digital treasures:

• Historical Newspapers and Indexes on the Internet - USA
• Wikipedia's list of Online Newspaper Archives
• About.com:Genealogy's "Historic Newspapers Online"

There is definitely some overlap on the lists, and they are by no means comprehensive. My google-search provided several websites that focused on the historic newspapers of one state. I hope you'll find a link to the newspaper that will have you doing your own "genealogy happy dance!"

Conflicting Sources

For whatever reason, happily I have had several researchers contact me this spring, wanting to compare notes and share information. Sometimes six months will go by without any new contacts, and then all of a sudden, things start to pick up! No complaints here....it's definitely a good thing.

Yesterday I was pleased to see a message in my inbox from a fellow BENNETT researcher. This is one of my husband's lines. One of his great-grandmothers was a BENNETT, and I've followed her family line from either Virginia or North Carolina (depending on the source) through Kentucky and finally to Boone County, Missouri. The researcher I heard from said this migration pattern looked familiar, and wondered if I wanted to compare notes.

In preparation for this, I took a harder look at my BENNETT file. Over the last couple of years, I've been moving my census data from the "General Notes" section of each individual's page to "Events" section. This works well with Legacy, and I like the way it prints out in my reports. While looking at my BENNETT file, I saw that I still had the censuses in the "Notes" area, and I proceeded to "clean up" the file, and put everything where it belonged. I have also obtained some new source material since I last worked on the BENNETTs -- books on Boone County MO marriages and cemetery records, as well as the Missouri Archives website with death certificates online. So it seemed like a good time to see if I could fill in some blanks. That's when I found a major conflict.

According to one source ("Tombstone Records of Boone County, Missouri, by Mrs. E.E. Evans and Mrs. J. F. Thompson), Page and Matilda BENNETT both died in 1867. According to Evans and Thompson, Matilda died in January of that year, and Page in June. However, this seems unlikely, since I have census images of them appearing in the 1870 U.S. Census, in Cedar Township, Boone County, Missouri! My guess is that their headstones were hard to read, and that Mrs. Evans or Mrs. Thompson misread the stone. I tried to find their stone (or stones) in the Nashville Baptist Church Cemetery, but didn't have any luck -- I'll try again another day.

Meanwhile, I'm making a list of other sources I could use to try to find accurate dates of death for this couple. I don't believe Boone County, Missouri has death certificates for that time period, but I will check on that. I believe they do have probate records, so that's one avenue to try. Another option will be to search the Newspaper Library for obituaries -- it's possible that the month and date information are correct, but just not the year. Either way, it looks like I've got another mystery to solve!

Fun Genealogical Fiction: Torie O'Shea Mysteries

There are lots of fun "genealogy" based works of fiction out there, but my favorite is Rett MacPherson's series of "Torie O'Shea Mysteries." Torie O'Shea is a genealogist in a small predominantly German town in Missouri. She works at the local Historical Museum, and her genealogical activities usually have her on the hunt to solve various mysteries that crop up.

I enjoy the mild humor and the down to earth characters. In each book we find Torie, her husband and children, her wheelchair bound mother and the local sheriff, who is married to Torie's mom. There is also a great "supporting cast" of local friends and neighbors that carry over from book to book. As a heroine, Torie is likable, plucky and irreverent.

The picture that MacPherson paints of a small Missouri town of German heritage is very familiar to me. Although "New Kassel" is fictional, it could easily be based any of the typical little German towns that line the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

The list of Torie O'Shea Mysteries is getting longer:

1997 Family Skeletons

1998 A Veiled Antiquity

1999 A Comedy of Heirs

2000 A Misty Mourning

2002 Killing Cousins

2003 Blood Relations

2004 In Sheep's Clothing

2005 Thicker Than Water

2006 Dead Man Running

2007 Died in the Wool

I started with Family Skeletons, and have worked my way down the list. I just checked out Dead Man Running from my local library, and am looking forward to starting it. They are definitely light reading -- but I enjoy the genealogical references, and watching Torie use her research skills and resources to solve each mystery.

If you have any favorite genealogy-related fiction books, please leave your recommendations in the "Comments" section below.

Enjoy the books!

Extra! Extra! Check out a Newspaper Library Near You

One of my favorite resources is my state's Newspaper Library. It's part of the State Historical Society of Missouri, located in Columbia, Missouri. They have over 41 million pages of Missouri newspapers on microfilm! These are available to be viewed at the library, or can be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan Service.

Nowadays we live in a very transient society -- but my husband's ancestors came to Boone County, Missouri anywhere from 100 to 185 years ago. So much of their history happened in one place. I can go to the Newspaper Library, and pick up any microfilm reel of the local Boone County newspaper, and probably find some mention of one of his ancestors in it. Sometimes it mentions the "big news," like births, deaths or marriages -- but often I'll find mentions of horses for sale, or out of town visitors, or local activities that they were involved in. If the vital statistics of our ancestors are the "bones" of our genealogy, then the information in these little day-to-day articles "put meat on the bones."

In doing a quick Google search on "Newspaper Library" or "Newspaper Collection" I found that many U.S. states have similar collections. There are also digital newspaper collections available online. Missouri has the Missouri Historical Newspaper Project that is free, but Ancestry.com and NewspaperARCHIVE.com both have subscription sites, with large digital collections available. With a little research, you may be able to find access to the newspapers your ancestors read. What a treat!

Happy Hunting!

Missouri Death Certificates

Kudos to the Missouri State Archives for the Missouri Death Certificate Project they have undertaken. They have indexed the death certificates for the years 1910 - 1956, and that index is available online via the Secretary of State's website. Even better, they are in the process of adding digital images as well. Images are available (free! in .pdf format) for 1910 - 1930, and 1950 - 1956. They must have quite a team of people working on this, because I've been amazed at how quickly they have been uploading the images.

There is so much valuable information available on death certificates. I'm proud of Missouri for making this information available, at a time when so many other states are reducing the access that we have to such records.

You can access the Missouri Death Certificates database here.

Happy Hunting!