Home » History » Italian Genealogy » Using Other Sources: Part I: Newspapers

Using Other Sources: Part I: Newspapers

© Eva Holmes

Not all of your research needs to be via vital records and family interviews. There are plenty of other sources out there. The following series of articles will hopefully give you some ideas about other places to look. This week's article will focus on how to find genealogical material in newspapers. I find old newspapers fascinating in general, especially the small-town newspapers. It's not just the strangeness of the stories, read against our modern backdrop, but even the type-face and layout seem fascinatingly bizarre. When there is the chance that I will find out something about my family, that makes it all the more exciting!

Local newspapers will provide the most material and are the easiest to browse through when you aren't looking for anything in particular. It can be tricky to discover the names of the newspapers that were published during your ancestor's lifetime. Many papers had very short lives, sometimes of a year or two, and then folded or were incorporated into another town (be sure to check for newspapers of neighboring towns).

Sometimes you can browse library catalogs by type of material, but this can be very time consuming. I've had the best luck with town histories, especially those written in the 20s or 30s. You can find these books by looking at a website such as www.bookfinder.com or by emailing the city hall or local historical society. Quite often, small towns will sell privately printed histories of their towns, the kind of thing you can't find at a major bookstore. Once you have some titles, I would suggest that you first look at the web page of the town library, which can be found through a search engine like yahoo.com. Most libraries have their catalogs online. If there is no local library, or if their collection isn't very good, try searching the state archives or local historical archives. It can be more difficult, however, to access this material.

Many newspapers have been put on microfilm. Unfortunately, others haven't. Sometimes a library is missing several rolls of microfilm, and for those small newspapers that had a run of only two or three years, I have the horrible feeling that those are lost forever.

Once you find the newspaper you want, make a careful note of the microfilm number and all other bibliographic information. You'll need this to fill out an inter-library loan form at your local library (sometimes you can fill these out online). Usually obtaining the microfilms is free. Sometimes you might have to pay a fee of a few dollars. Some libraries don't loan out all of their material, but you'll receive a response in any case.

The copyright of the article Using Other Sources: Part I: Newspapers in Italian Genealogy is owned by . Permission to republish Using Other Sources: Part I: Newspapers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.