Sorry For The Delay

It's taking me a while to get to the next research post. That's because I picked up a pair of assignments from Military History Quarterly - one on the "Heliograph" (think of it as a "sun telegraph" using mirrors to flash the sun's rays  - see below) and the other on "Operations Research" (a rather esoteric discipline that looks to improve how systems work). I'm pretty much done with the first, and should be able to get to the post about Historical Societies before starting the second. Thank you for your patience.

The photo shows an early U.S. Army heliograph. On the right is the mirror system that reflects the sun's rays. On the left is a shutter used to send Morse Code dots and dashes by blocking the flash from the mirror. The range on these instruments could be over 100 miles (on a sunny day). They were invented c. 1869, and in use by armies around the world until after World War I.

The Digital Morgues: Historic Newspapers – The Feebies

There are probably more free historic newspaper archives on the Internet than fee-based, but these “feebies” constitute some of the most important—and to writers and genealogists, useful—publications in the world, among them The New York Times, The Times of London, the Washington Post, and the Economist. There are also paid services, like Ancestry.com and GeneaologyBank.com that maintain newspaper databases. Let’s take a look at a few of these.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Times offers a digital archive of virtually every issue (and hence, every article—more than 13 million of them) published since 1851. Go here for more information. 

The Times has set up three different date ranges for viewing articles. 

From 1851 through 1922 articles are actually free to anyone, but there is a monthly limit of ten freebies before the feebie kicks in. So from your 11^th article on you’ll have to pay $3.95 each.

From 1923 to 1986 nonsubscribers pay the $3.95 from the get-go.

And from 1987 through today, it’s back to the “free with monthly limit” program.

n.b.: The New York Times established a “pay wall” a couple of years ago, which means that even if you want to troll this past weekend’s issues, you’ll have to pay to look at more than ten items per month.

If you become a subscriber to The Times’ digital service, you can get up to 100 “free” archive articles a month in that center range, and unlimited use in the early and late ranges.

The cheapest digital subscription is $3.75 per week, and includes NYTimes.com and their Smartphone App. Pay more and you have access to the paper through more devices. You can subscribe on a monthly basis if you want—no long term commitment is required.

The main search page gives you a number of options.

There is a box for the search term(s). Under that you can choose how the results are sorted (Newest, Oldest, and the default, Relevance). Over there on the left you can pick the date range. The default range is “All Since 1851.” You’ll probably not want to choose that option, unless you want to wade through ten million plus results. Skip down to “Specific Dates” and click on that. Up pop two lines in which to enter a range. In this case I entered 01/01/1870 to 12/31/1872. Now—and this is important—before you enter a search term click on “REFINE SEARCH” That will narrow the search down to all results in that time period, in this case about 6,000.

Now you can enter the search term. I’ve entered the name of one of the people I’ve been researching, “harpending.” And having done that, you can now click “Go.” I don’t know why The Times has gone to this two-step search process (until recently it required just one step). All in the name of progress, eh?  

So the results show about 17 articles featuring someone called Harpending. My guy’s first name is “Asbury,” so those items about “Abraham” can be bypassed. 

These pre-1923 articles open up as page images, and are easily printable—just go to the printer icon in the upper right and click “OK”. You can also download the article as a PDF.

TIP: If you are a nonsubscriber and have paid the $3.95 for the item, I highly recommend you download it so you’ll have the file for future reference.

Occasionally—and maddeningly—the site goes down and may stay down for a few days. But on the whole, The New York Times Archive site is well-organized, simple to use, and is a very productive resource.

THE TIMES OF LONDON

The actual title of the newspaper is simply The Times, but to differentiate it from the New York paper of the same name, many people call it The Times of London.

And while this Times is an awesomely valuable source for news from the entire world dating from 1785 onward, it is only available to subscribers. Which is to say, they do not offer a pay-per-view service, and have no plans to offer one. The cheapest subscription, the “Digital Pack,” will set you back £4 per week (about $6.00) with a minimum 12 month contract. If you’re lucky enough to live in a large city or near a large university you may be able to access the Times through their libraries—if you go there in person. Otherwise you’re plain out of luck.

Having recently had access to the Times’ archives I can tell you that the search can be a bit clunky, navigating can be difficult, and printing is a pain (best bet is to open a PDF and print using the technique described in the last post). But my oh my the stuff you can find there.

THE WASHINGTON POST (And Others)

The Post is among several large metropolitan newspapers that have turned their archives over to ProQuest, a company that claims to be the “world’s largest digital newspaper archive.” Other publications include the Chicago Tribune (1852-1988), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1868-1939), Hartford Courant (1764-1986), Boston Globe (1872-1979), Christian Science Monitor (1908-1980), and the Los Angeles Times (1881-1988).

Articles from the Post and all these other papers are available, thankfully, on a pay-per-view basis. But, oddly, the fee structure for each is different.

For example, at the Washington Post you pay $3.95 for one item, or you can buy packs, like the  4 Article Week Pass, costing $10.95. The 3 Month Pass, at $29.95 for 25 articles, is a relative bargain—each item then costs just $.83. Over at the Boston Globe, you cannot buy one item, but for $9.95 you can by an unlimited one month pass (they also have 3 month and 12 month deals). The LA Times does do singles, for $3.95, and offers a variety of passes that limit the total number of articles you can view. Why all these ProQuest digital papers offer different deals is puzzling, but the bottom line is: you can have full access to the archives.

THE ECONOMIST

I look forward each week to the arrival of this slick, color news magazine. At least that’s what it looks like. But its British publishers steadfastly insist their publication is a “newspaper.” 

Whatever it is, The Economist has been around since 1843. Early on it mainly covered financial news, but gradually expanded to just about every subject under the sun. It can be a great reference for independent researchers, but it does require an annual subscription. That’s not unusual. But what is unusual is that even if you’re a regular subscriber to the magazine you have zero-zilch-nada access to The Economist’s digital archives. That access will set you back another $160 annually. I’ve been a subscriber for the magazine for over 30 years and I find this a bit outrageous. 

Just FYI - Proquest’s main competitor, Gale Cengage Learning, manages the archive for The Economist (as it does the Times of London’s and many other papers. Alas, neither of these companies offer their wares to the general public.

But fortunately there is a free work-around for The Economist’s expensive archive—or a partial one, at any rate. The rapidly growing HathiTrust Digital Library offers  access to The Economist for the years 1843 to 1899 as part of their extensive “19^th Century British Periodicals” collection.

If you’re not familiar with HathiTrust now’s a good time to start. They are a partnership of 60 major research institutions and libraries “working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future.” They already have nearly 11 million total volumes digitized. Only a fraction of these collections are available to the general public—Hathi’s main audience is, like Proquest and Cengage, institutional. But by all means check it out.

THE NEW YORKER

A much more enlightened take on the nature of a “subscriber” is that taken by The New Yorker magazine. Anyone who subscribes to the print or digital editions automatically has access to the entire archive, dating back to dandy Eustace Tilley’s appearance on the cover of the first issue, February 21, 1925. The range of articles published in The New Yorker is wider than you might think (it’s more than just cartoons—much more). And the list of contributors reads like a “Who’s Who” of 20^th and 21^st century writers: Cheever, Capote, Dahl, Salinger, Nabokov, Updike, Welty, Parker, Roth, Salinger, Thurber, and it goes on and on. If you’re researching NASA and the American Space Program, there is a trove of contemporary pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s that really captures the spirit of the time.

GenealogyBank.com and Ancestry.com

These two feebies offer a wide range of information services mainly to folks trying to track their roots. But these are both invaluable resources for writers and history researcher.

GenealogyBank.com's real value is its huge collection of online digital newspapers, dating from 1690, and including every state in the union. Many of them are available from no other source on the web. The search feature has just been improved, so you can intuitively enter date ranges. Start by filling in the name or other keywords. Then add the date range (not obligatory). And over on the right you can check off one or more states to troll through. As you tick them off, they light up on the map. Nice feature.

The results are cleanly displayed. Click on what you want to read and in a little while the article will pop up. Printing is easy—just go to icon in the upper right.

You can subscribe for $19.95 a month, or take an annual subscription for $69.95.

Ancestry.com is the giant among genealogy-centric websites. It, too, has a historical newspaper database, but I find it less useful than GeneaologyBank’s. Where Ancestry really shines is in tracking families. There are indexed, searchable U.S. Census records from 1790 through 1940 (the most recent—it will be another decade before 1950 appears). There are City Directories, which are really useful for finding where people lived and what their occupations were (my guy, Harpending, proudly bragged he was a “Capitalist”). Passenger Lists can be used to track the movement of your subjects. Military Records provide a surprising amount of detail about men in the armed services, including, for example, U.S. Marine Corps Muster Rolls from 1798 to 1958, and Draft Registrations from both WWI and WWII.

This only begins to scratch the surface of what Ancestry.com has tucked away in its server farms. You can subscribe monthly for $22.95, or six months for $77.70 ($12.95 month). It’s good value for a very valuable resource.

As you can see, feebie digital archives are available, sometimes at a reasonable cost, sometimes not so much. The publications listed above are just a few of the ones you can gain access to. To find them on the web, your best bet is to type in the name of the magazine or newspaper along with the word “archive” and see what turns up.

Another Approach

At least two organizations, the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society of Boston, offer their premium members online access to a pair of really useful historic newspaper collections:  19^th Century U.S. Newspapers and Early American Newspapers. To join either group will cost you $80 per year. And they both also maintain extensive online and onshelf genealogic and historic collections.

The 19^th Century database (from Cengage)—encompasses over 500 newspapers and some 1.7 million pages. The Early American set is from NewsBank, which is the parent of GenealogyBank.com. It comprises well over a thousand titles.

In the next post we’ll get take a look at digital offerings of historical societies large and small.

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.

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.