Genealogical Society of Santa Cruz County



Exploring - - Handout

© Gail Burk, October, 2016

How to Access

This database can be accessed at home, using your library card number and PIN number. Go to the Santa Cruz Public Library website at . The library home page has recently changed its format. The new design, however, is very easy to use. Choose the “Research” tab from the top toolbar at the top of the home page. On the next screen, click on the “Genealogy” button in the middle of the page. On the following screen, there are two main categories: “Genealogy & Family History,” and “Newspaper Indexes.” Scroll down the list of “Newspaper Indexes” until you reach “ - World Collection,” and click on that link. Enter your library card number and PIN number. Then begin your search!

This database can also be accessed from any branch of the Santa Cruz Public Library. Use your library card and PIN number to log onto the library computer, or use your own laptop. Use the same steps to reach as you would from your home computer. If you use the library’s Internet computers, you will be limited to one hour per day.

Introduction

The emphasis of is small town America. The fact that emphasizes small town papers is especially useful for genealogists, as so many of our nineteenth and early twentieth century ancestors resided in rural locations. For the U.S., there are newspapers from every state in the country, to a greater or lesser extent, including Alaska and Hawaii. The states with the heaviest coverage are (from east to west): Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and California. On the “See All” page, newspapers are arranged in alphabetical order by name of paper, not by location of publication.

The home page has links to extremely helpful articles and videos on how to best use the newspaper database. The “Get Started” section explains in detail how to navigate and search the site, crop and clip articles, save searches and share items. The “Introduction” and “Searching” videos are especially helpful. You will want to use these help functions often.

Use the “Search,” “Browse,” “Papers,” and “Clippings” links in upper left corner of home page to go directly where you want to go. Researchers can search for information ranging from major historic events to items regarding extremely local people and events.

Search - - allows both basic & advanced search options

Browse - - allows browsing of newspapers by country & state

Papers - - shows all newspapers in the database by newspaper name

Clippings - - shows clippings by other subscribers

Searching and viewing the database

Begin by typing a first and last name in search box on the home page. Enclose the first and last name together inside quotation marks, to make sure that the list of matches includes only individuals with both names together. You can limit your search by time period, by geographic location, and by a single publication.

When you find an article about your ancestor, make sure to navigate through all hits for that name in that edition of the publication. Look at the other pages of the same publication to gain historical perspective about the place your ancestor lived. Be sure to widen your search net. You may find articles about your ancestor in places you never thought to look.

Useful tools on

When you find an article about your ancestor, utilize all the tools at your disposal. You can crop and clip a specific article. The clipping function is one of the most useful tools on the site. In order to use the clipping tool, requires you to complete a free, one-time registration, creating an individual profile.

After clipping an article, you can add comments to it (which later helps you to know what it is about after you accumulate a number of clippings for different people), download it to your computer, print it, e-mail it to yourself or others, save it to your tree on Ancestry, and share it on Facebook and Twitter.

You can also save your searches, and follow a particular newspaper. Using this function will enable you to receive notifications to your e-mail address when additional newspapers or editions are added to the database that might aid your research. You can see, and edit, all your clippings by signing in to your profile page. You can review your saved searches at your profile page. You may set and adjust your privacy settings on your profile page at any time.

Strategies

To get the most out of , do your census work and other research in preparation for using the newspaper database. You will most easily find your ancestors in the database if you know the county and township of residence for your ancestor so as to narrow down the list of matches to a manageable number. Nineteenth century newspapers often organized news items by township within the county. Knowing the correct township for your ancestor also allows you to avoid clipping articles about an unrelated person with the same name.

When you first find your ancestor in a particular newspaper, take a little extra time to peruse all the pages in several issues of that publication, in order to get a sense of how that newspaper organizes its various categories of news. You will learn which pages tend to cover which categories of items (e.g., obituaries may always be on the back pages; township news may be covered on the second page, etc.). Make a note of how often your newspaper of interest is published. Many small town newspapers were only published once per week, usually on the same day of the week. Knowing the day and date of publication can help you establish precisely when a particular event occurred, when the article itself does not specify the date.

Try searching for a named person in various ways. Be sure to try first name/surname combos, first name/middle initial/last name combos, first and middle initials/surname combos. Don’t forget that there may be more than one person with the same first and last name in any county, even in sparsely settled areas. Many times, married women are simply referred to by the initials and surname of their husbands. Spelling and typesetting were not always a precise art, so be sure to try all conceivable spellings of names.

When you find an item about one of your ancestors that mentions some other relative visiting from some other place, search to see if the database also has newspapers from the other place. Don’t despair if there are no publications in the database from a location you want to search; you may find articles about your ancestor in a newspaper from a nearby place that is in the database. Do not confine your search just to the places you know about for your ancestors. You may find articles about your ancestor in surprising places.

Was your ancestor one of the first settlers in the area you are researching? If so, you may find numerous articles about that person and his/her family, as many small town newspapers often published items about area pioneers, including information about when they arrived and where they lived before arrival. Don’t forget to research subjects as well as people; your newspaper of interest may have published articles about the history of the county and the township.

In addition to the obvious items of genealogical interest, such as marriage notices, birth notices, and obituaries, many articles mention every-day events: church picnics, club meetings, bumper peach harvests, floods, fires, construction of new dwellings, sale of livestock and real estate, school attendance records and notices of graduation, birthday parties, bridal showers, music and drama productions, visits from relatives, and advertisements for family businesses. From this minutiae, the genealogical researcher can put together a detailed portrait of the life of an ancestor in that place. When using , remember to employ the “FAN” approach, to see what events were affecting your ancestor by researching collateral relatives, friends, associates and neighbors of your ancestor.

Additionally, by reading the general news on the front pages of the newspaper, we can learn what local, regional, national and international events were occurring at the time our ancestor was there. From such general news, we can learn about the political and economic climate in our ancestor’s community. We can read what natural or man-made disasters were impacting the town, and how the local population was affected.

Perhaps the greatest benefit to using the database is that it can act as a symbiotic resource to other genealogical resources, such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, and Find A Grave, and thereby open doors that we did not know were there!

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