The Digital Morgues: Historic Newspapers – The Freebies

It has long been true that one of a historian’s or genealogist’s most productive sources has been back issues of newspapers. Until very recently if you wanted to troll through old issues of The Tombstone Epitaph you either had to go to Tombstone, Arizona in person, or a find a library that a)  had the Epitaph on microfilm, and b)  would loan their film through Inter-Library Loan (ILL). Otherwise out of luck you were.

Free Digitized Newspapers

Times have changed. Thanks to a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, hundreds of American newspapers have been digitized and are available free through LOC’s Chronicling America website. In the case of the Tombstone Epitaph, six different series of the paper, from 1880 to 1922, totaling 2100 issues, are available online. And if that isn’t enough to sate you, four other Tombstone papers are available from the LOC.

Unfortunately, the LOC site lists papers from only 30 states (and four of those only have one title each). Missing from Chronicling America are such states as Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, Nevada, and Maine. 

But wait! Even though 20 states are not digitally represented on the LOC, there are dozens of other websites where you might find a veritable trove of the missing. Some places are going it largely along, although nearly all states have made use of grants from NEH’s U.S. Newspaper Program.

For example: Colorado. 

While this state does not participate in the Chronicling America program, it has a substantial online newspaper archive of its own that includes 163 titles covering the period 1859 to 1923. This Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection (CHNC) is funded directly by the state through the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Historical Society. NEH also provided $345,000.

While CHNC is a valuable resource, the site is a bit clunky and can be difficult to navigate. In Search, if you want to specify a Date Range you cannot just type it into the blank boxes. You must click the calendar icons, which open calendar windows, and select the beginning and end dates by scrolling through the months and years, and then only when you click on the start day will it enter the whole megillah. Hits appear on your screen, and simply double-click to read the one you’re interested in. Happy reading.

Printing articles from CHNC is a royal pain, and the easiest method is to save the story as a PDF. Once the article opens go to the upper left and look for View. Click that and choose View Item In PDF. This will bring up the entire issue, but opens on the article you want to print.

To print the PDF find the Adobe menu bar (sometimes hidden toward the bottom—a swipe of the cursor will highlight it, or sometimes it’s a continuous bar across the top. Using the + or – icons change the size of the displayed article to suit your needs. Anything smaller than 66.7% magnification will be hard to read on the printed page.

Now, click the Maximize button on the upper right, and using the cursor, change the width and height of the window, and the move the scroll bar, to encompass only what you want to print. See the PDF printer icon (top or bottom bars)? Click on that. Do not use your browser’s print function—it will emphatically not work. 

That opens the Print window. Over there on the left, under the Pages box, you’ll see More Options. Click on that, then click on Current View. This lets you print only the what you see on the screen. You may need to fool about with magnifications and borders to get just what you need. The example here has been narrowed from three columns to one for better readability. 

TIP: Do not make the PDF window so narrow that the Print icon disappears from its bar (do that and you cannot access the print menu).

To print the whole piece simply reposition the article and print again until you have full coverage. I know it’s cumbersome, but it gives you a lot more precise control over what you print in any PDF. And I’ve found this to be the best way to print stories from whole newspaper pages, especially 7 or 8 column broadsheets.

California 

Despite its chronic financial woes, this state is well along with its newspaper digitizing (getting nearly $7 million from NEH was certainly a boon). Whereas Chronicling America has just 18 California newspapers, the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) has 37 titles, including the fabulously useful and interesting Daily Alta California (1894-1891). All together there are just shy of 60,000 issues online. 

The user interface and the navigation is much better than the “C” state mentioned above. In Search you can easily type in the subject, click the date range, and click the paper or papers you want the computer to look through. If too many Advertisement items pop up to suit you, over on the left you can click on Articles and after a quick rearrangement, the pages will show just those.

To navigate around the page just hold in the left mouse button and drag as required.

Printing from the CDNC site is easier than from the CHNC. If the article you need to print is a short one, right-click on the story and up comes a little window with some options. Click on Clip This Article, and that brings up a new page with just your story. You can then print that out through your browser.

TIP: If the story you want to print using Clip This Article is longer than a few column inches then revert to the PDF method outlined above. Right-click on the article, but this time choose PDF of This Page.

Finding Minutia

One of the great things about digital newspapers is the ability to search accurately for just about anything. If the original paper is not in good condition, or the scan is poorly made, search results will suffer. But on the whole, it all works very well indeed. 

Using the CDNC I was able to track the movements of Philip Arnold, the main organizer of the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. Knowing that many West Coast papers printed notices about passengers who were arriving on the Overland Trains from the east or on ships from other West Coast ports, I entered “philp arnold” AND passengers into the search window.

Translation of search terms: By putting quotes around “philp arnold” the engine would look for those two words adjacent to each other. By using the Boolean search operator AND, the engine now knows to look for “philip arnold” and “passengers” on the same page. Click enter and . . .

Shoot, no results. Let’s modify the search terms. Because newspaper articles in the late 19^th century often used first name initials rather than spelling names out, I searched again for “p arnold” AND passengers. Wham! Two hits.

TIP:  To increase your chances of getting useful search hits, be sure to try variations of names, places, events, and things. For example, one of “my” people, John Burchem Slack, can be found as: “JB Slack,” “J Slack,” “Burcham,” and “Stack.”

In the first article Arnold, and as it turns out, another key person the Diamond Hoax story, J B Cooper, were traveling together outbound from San Diego to San Francisco arriving aboard the good ship Orizaba on the 28^th of November 1870. This filled in an important gap in tracking Arnold’s movements. 

The second notice, about passengers who had Ogden left on the westbound Overland Train in late April 1871, shows a “P Arnold, San Francisco.” Is this my Mr. Arnold? Maybe, but additional research is necessary to corroborate that it was.

This technique can be used to track people on trains, ships, in hotels, and at events.

Where Are More Freebies?

To search for state newspaper collections the best browser search term is: [state] digital newspaper archive. 

The Google Newspaper Archive is another source. This project, begun in the mid-2000’s, was unfortunately abandoned in 2011 for reasons that remain unclear (but, they say, didn’t have anything to do with copyright issues). Google did manage to scan millions of pages from over 2,000 papers. There are a great many Canadian and French-Canadian publications in their collection.

Wikipedia has a page dedicated to digital papers links, including many publications from all around the world, many of them free. 

In the next post we’ll get into paid digitized Historic Newspapers—the Feebies; more indispensable sources for writers and genealogists.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Trolling The History Warehouses – Part Three – Local Heroes

There are warehouses of historical stuff dotted all over North America. Some of them, like the National Archives and the Library of Congress, are gigantic, with hundreds of thousands of linear feet of records see that last two posts). Others, like the Pottstown Historical Society, housed in a tiny former flower shop in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, has a collection totaling 125 linear feet. That’s not much, but if it has exactly what you’re looking for, well then it’s a gold mine.

In between the behemoths and the dwarfs are repositories of bewildering variety.

All these places can be broadly categorized into two sorts: Public and Private.

Into the first category fall places like state and local archives, libraries, some museums, and most public educational institutions.

The second category includes privately-endowed research centers and museums, like the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California or the Lycoming College Archives in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Most of these places are organized as non-profits entities. But just because they are privately-owned doesn’t  mean the materials are closed to public researchers—it usually just means that access is more restricted.

Let’s take a closer look at some of these places.

State, County, and City Archives and Libraries

All states in the union maintain record keeping departments of one sort of another. For a list of links try the Council of State Archivists. Many states also have separate state historical societies (for a list, go here). The nature of the collections vary. The Keystone State’s archives, records, and vital statistics are maintained by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. In Nevada the State Library and Archives handles both the old stuff and new.

County and city government archive departments are much rarer. It goes without saying that New York City has its Municipal Archives—a comprehensive collection of historical material, as well as vital statistics. They also have digitized and uploaded over 870,000 images. Philadelphia’s City Archives has nearly 90,000 photos and 5,000 maps online (with 2 million more images available in the stacks).

Private and Semi-Public Repositories

Within the Private category are company archives and libraries, few of which are readily available to outsiders. IBM has an enlightened policy toward their historical files. As they note in their Terms and Conditions for use, “It is the intent of the IBM Corporate Archives to make selected information publicly available in order to advance the study of science, information technology, and the IBM Corporation.” You can’t just wander in to peruse on your own, but the company will endeavor to help you with reasonable requests.

AT&T offers even more access to researchers: “Although the AT&T Archives and History Center exists to serve company activities and is not open to the general public, the Archives invites serious scholars to make use of the collections. We are delighted to supply digital copies of photographs or other select non-proprietary documents at no cost. Research visits, however, are the best means to access the collections, and must be scheduled in advance. Onsite databases are available to researchers for identifying archival materials.”

Some corporate archives are available through semi-public research centers. For example, the Hagley Museum and Library, outside Wilmington Delaware, houses the records of E.I. DuPont Nemours, the RCA Corporation (transferred from the now-closed David Sarnoff Library), the Singer Company, makers of sewing machines, and the famous industrial designer, Raymond Loewy. The Hagley collections total 34,000 linear feet, and several thousand items are now available as digital files—with more added every month. 

The University of Miami houses the gigantic Pan American World Airways collection, numbering 960 boxes of everything you would ever want to know about the operations of this pioneering (and long defunct) airline. A detailed folder-level PDF finding aid is available online. 

There must be thousands of historical societies in the U.S. Some are grand affairs, like the 189 year-old Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. HSP says it is one of the nation’s largest non-governmental repositories of documentary materials, and with a collection of some 20 million manuscripts, their claim is easy to believe.

Alas, while the Society is making great strides toward increasing its digital offerings, none of the online material is free, which is unfortunate. The December 1863 letter from General George Meade to his wife (below) is six pages long and a photocopy or PDF will cost you $9.00 (plus freight if you order a hardcopy).

One neat feature on the HSP website is the Hidden Collections Initiative, which brings together in one place links to 47 historical societies, museums, and collections in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Earlier we mentioned the tiny Pottstown Historical Society. Let’s take a look at what’s on offer.

The papers of two local families and two local companies are listed, as are a couple of collections of photographs. There are no online documents, just the finding aids. But that will change with time.

Among the big time players in historical collections is the multifaceted Huntington Library in Southern California. Founded by the very rich—and civic-minded—Henry E. Huntington in 1919, it is part archive, part library, part art museum, and part botanical garden. It is especially strong in material related to the American West. And as they like to say, “The Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts in the fields of British and American history and literature is nothing short of extraordinary.” 

The site can be a little hard to navigate if all you’re interested in are their manuscripts and photographs. From the home page click Library in the upper left. In the new window click Library Online Catalog. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a browse feature, so type in your Search and off you go. 

I was looking for information about the Great Diamond Hoax, and knew that the personal papers of a high-powered New York lawyer peripherally involved in the scandal, Samuel L.M. Barlow, were at the Huntington. Unfortunately, the finding aid for the 211 boxes is pretty skimpy—there was nothing to browse. To get around this, I went back to search and put in the name of one of the story’s protagonists and got four hits, including a letter he had written to Barlow. Clicking on the listing revealed a brief, and helpful summary of the missive.

The “entrance requirements” for onsite research at the Huntington seem downright daunting. They have strict requirements for independent scholars like us. You need to complete a two-page application, stating who you are, what you want to do, what you’ve published, and include two letters of reference from “scholars in good standing [that] can attest to your need for access to the Huntington’s collections.” Yikes.

But . . . if you discover that the Library has materials you need, write them a nice email, with as many specifics as you can. They have responded very quickly to my requests, and have quite obligingly found stuff, reproduced it (either hardcopy or digital), and sent it to me (usually for a reasonable fee). The staff has always been very helpful.

TIP: If you need to rely on the staff to find stuff for you, be really nice, friendly, not too demanding, and try to build some rapport with the archivist you deal with. It’ll pay big dividends in the long run.

The Huntington’s Digital Library is small, but expanding rapidly. The example below is the online image of Ben Franklin’s Autobiography written out by Ben himself. Quite extraordinary. Digital. And free. You can print this and all the other items in the Digital Library yourself (though there may be some usage rights issues for some stuff).

So, that’s a brief look at more categories of brick and mortar History Warehouses. If you are Patient, Persevering, and Imaginative, you can find all sorts of stuff in all sorts of seemingly hidden nooks and niches all over the web. Good hunting.

In the next post we’ll get into digitized Historic Newspapers—free and fee; indispensable sources for writers and genealogists.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Trolling The History Warehouses – Part Two - The Library of Congress

Like the National Archives, the Library of Congress (LOC) is a key repository of documents related to the founding and history of the United States of America.

Established in 1800 by an act of Congress as a reference library for the legislative branch, today’s LOC has a broad mandate to “further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people.” It performs this and its other functions from three imposing buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Of most interest to writers and genealogists is the vast collection of books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, technical reports, personal papers, maps, audio and video recordings, microforms, sheet music, manuscripts posters, prints and jeepers, a lot of other stuff. The entire LOC collection numbers over 150 million items—a fraction of NARA’s holdings, but by no means a piddling amount. 

One of the great features of finding stuff at the LOC is the amount of their material that has been, in one way or another, brought into the digital world. Peruse the list of holdings in the Manuscript Division and you’ll note that a box-level—and sometimes even a folder-level—finding aid for each collection is available for online viewing. That makes finding stuff a lot easier, but for the most part you’ll still need to request the relevant department to reproduce the files you seek.

How do we start our troll through the Library of Congress? The well organized Home Page is cleanly designed for easy navigation. You’ll note nine topic windows in the center that will lead you deeper into the site. On the right side is a list of slightly more specific topics. Up at the top are two links that will help make the digital LOC experience fun and fruitful: DigitalCollections  and Library Catalogs. 

Click on Digital Collections. Way back in 1994 the LOC began to digitize selections of its original holdings to put online. As the Library likes to say, they provide “one of the largest bodies of noncommercial high-quality content on the Internet . . . [so that] those who may never come to Washington can gain access to the treasures of the nation’s library.” In this regard, the LOC is way ahead of NARA. And as someone obsessed with finding stuff, I say bless ‘em.

Let’s delve. Click on American History and Culture. That brings up a page with a list of 18 topics. Our example subject for today is the U.S. Army Air Forces 306^th Bomb Group (Heavy) based out of Thurleigh, Bedfordshire, England during WWII. So click on Veterans History and then Search The Veterans Collections.

A search box offering a number of options appears. Type in “306^th bomb group”, and tick-off “service unit/ship,” “World War II,” and “Army Air Forces/Corps.” Then hit GO.

This should bring up 64+ hits of names of veterans who were in some way connected with the 306^th. You’ll notice that about 20% of the  listings have a View Digital Collection icon. This means that some aspect of that fellow’s file is accessible online—audio or video interviews, and/or interview transcripts, and sometimes photographs. 

Let’s see what Blackshaw, Kenneth Dean, has to say online. Our click brings up a short bio and a list of the digital materials available. In his case there is an interview transcript and a 6-page biography. 

You can use your browser’s Find box to look for specific names, places, or events within the transcript. What does he say about the missions he flew? There are three entries, one of which will tell you he flew a total of 35. 

The biography of Lt Col Blackshaw is an un-indexed document scan, and is therefore not digitally searchable. You’ll have to do it manually.

Where there is no View Digital Collection listed next to a name in the collection, you can still check to see what material is available. In the case of Norman Eugene Outcalt, there is an oral history on DVD. And John Henry Roberts has a interview transcription that is available, possibly as a digital file. In cases like these, again, you’ll need to contact LOC directly to see about getting reproductions.

The Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division holds the papers of several hundred prominent Americans and organizations, with extensive PDF finding aids. In some cases large numbers of the original papers are available in digital form. The collection of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers is a splendid example—LOC has over 51,000 images from 4,700 separate items.

Click on BrowseSeries to see the index of general Bell topics. Under Laboratory Notebooks you can view the entire contents of two volumes of the famous inventor’s personal notebooks—one from 1910, and the other covering 1891-1893.

A similar online collection is available of Abraham Lincoln’s papers (61,000 images, 10,000 transcriptions) and the 19^th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s papers (38,000 images). The Library’s Thomas Jefferson collection is the largest at LOC, with 83,000 images.

If you’re looking for illustrations for your book or article, the Library of Congress is a great place to start. They have digitized over 1 million images from their collections. From the main home page you can access the Prints and Photographs Online Collection (PPOC).  There is an especially good selection of Civil War views (7,000). But let’s take a different tack.

Scroll down to the Prokudin-GorskiiCollection  — one of the most charming holdings at the Library. This set of two thousand-some photographs was acquired by the Library in 1948.

It’s the work of Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who in the early 20^th century set out to document the life and people of his native land. What’s unique about these photographs is that most are in color, made with an unusual process involving three separate negatives, each exposed through a different filter (red, green, blue). When combined in projection (or digitally by the LOC) the result is a color photograph of extraordinary richness.

The photo below, of the Emir of Bukhara, is a splendid example of P-G’s work. Downloaded from the 204kb LOC color jpeg file, it has not been retouched in any way (save for cropping).

We’ve only scratched the surface of what stuff is available at the Library of Congress. Not only does the LOC have tons of downloadable stuff, but every day it’s putting more and more online. Their website is well worth bookmarking, and checking in on frequently.

Next time we’ll delve deeper into History Warehouses, with a look at smaller and  local repositories. 

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the post date. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.