Newspaper Research (Anne Mitchell Live)

i'm so thrilled okay tell us where you're where you're joining from and what it is you do and welcome to family searches live stream everybody hi everybody it is just a pleasure to be here with you all today um my name is ann gillespie mitchell you may have seen me in other videos or maybe you met me at rootstech today i'm here to talk about newspapers i've been with ancestry.com for 12 years but i work with a variety of products i work with newspapers and fold three and find a grave and roots web i also work on the version of ancestry you see in the library so if it's out there i've probably worked on it this is great we can ask we can ask questions so many questions and um i will do my best okay oh it's so exciting to have you and we're talking newspapers today tell us about a little bit about your family and maybe why you're interested in family history love to um so i have been interested in family history before i joined ancestry um it's a hobby it was a hobby and then um when i saw an opening ancestry i was like oh i've got to see if i can get that job so that's how that all came about um i just started researching different things my dad was really into it and then i sort of picked it up from him and um i was really surprised because i live in california now but i was really surprised how deep my southern roots were all my ancestors who are in the states and we've been here since the 1700s or either in virginia north carolina or south carolina all of them until my generation when we all started moving around so very deep southern roots um uh my claim to fame is i am a very distant cousin of johnny cash oh yes yes that's awesome man in black so yes that is my famous person that i mentioned i love that but it it's the little stories which is what newspapers is so good at right but it's the little stories that you find out about people that are just make it so worthwhile oh yes and i i can't wait for us to dive into um your wealth of knowledge around understanding how to search and leverage what newspaper resources there are out there and so for today we're specifically focusing on newspapers.com but there'll be times where you address some other recommendations people can't find a location or newspaper for a location so i say we go ahead and we get started and people who are participating if you have questions about newspapers.com please let us know and we're going to kick this off with why do newspapers matter when it comes to family history and genealogy yes um okay so i'm sharing my screen yes it seems like the perfect backdrop okay um so why do newspapers matter because when you do your family history we do our family trees we keep working just in straight lines right but we and we find the names and we're super excited but we have to be able to put people in context right because if you were born in 1950 it's really different obviously that if you're born in 1850 and you know that at some level but you have to put yourself in context how are women treated differently how were how is education different all these things in newspapers is going to help you discover that part of the country and how to put your ancestors in context so for me newspapers is all about context well and i think like you as you were talking you know you can you can see from the types of ads or comics or the headlines or the announcements and i think that's very compelling even if you're not researching ancestors just to get an understanding of location time and place so i love that well take us through kind of the basics of how to search and what newspapers.com has to offer okay so whether you're searching on newspapers.com or any other newspaper site or even a book it's really different than searching say on ancestry or family search because on ancestry or family search you know names you know um birth dates and you know locations and when you type those things into search the ancestry and family search they know those things too right so let's say that i'm going to and i've got the newspapers up here and you see a search box so you're going to just type something in now i'm not making this up okay i have an ancestor i'm numbing this up whose name is ready cash okay this is great all right and they lived in virginia he's part of my johnny cash line okay now if i'm going to type that into ancestry ancestry will know that ready is his first name actually it's redding but he went by ready and the cash was his last name but you'll notice that when i type it in here ready cash think about how often that phrase is just going to show up like down here right yes phrase so why is it different that's the difference between newspapers and what we call um fielded search over on ancestry or find our family search this is all ocr we bring up the um if you look at any page here we have uh scanners that go through and it's called optical character recognition and they just scan scan scan then we apply some really smart data science principles other things to help identify um ads words all that good kind of stuff but if you've got one of those really weird names that um could be something else like ready cat ready cash that is you have to be a little bit more clever and i'll show you here in a second um some things you can do to make it feel more uh fielded where you can do location and date but one of the best tests anywhere you're searching and this is goes way beyond newspapers okay type in ready cash if you get back ready cash is a name you're on fielded search if you get it back as a phrase you're probably in ocr okay and um so you're searching by name and how do people know okay take just show us something maybe that you found with him in that do you have anything fun i actually don't have any newspaper articles for him i just used him because yes yes because so how do people know um if you have because you have how many thousands of newspapers available on this website you're the biggest we're the biggest yes that doesn't always make you the best but in this case i think it does let's go with that let's go with that i'm i'm very very proud of the sights i'm working you should be it's fantastic and so tell us how we know if we're going to have luck finding information here if this is something we should investigate because you never know right so um before you ever start searching on any site you should go and find their card catalog their browse whatever it is so you get a feel for what's there if you go over here to browse on newspapers you'll see us these are all the non-us sites that we currently have content for and it's constantly growing australia canada england etc uh let's say that you were looking for somewhere in the u.s um a lot of the or a couple of the examples i'm going to do today are in north and south carolina so click on north carolina we tend to think of genealogy and family history in terms of counties but newspapers are done in cities cities sometimes during denton counties right but sometimes in cities so you have to dig in this way i'm so if you're looking for somebody who lived in the charlotte area you've got all these options that's a lot of options that's a lot i've uncovered all sorts of fun little details and some of them are grim and some of them are fun um but you'll find and because the newspapers you know if it's grim or it's sensational you're much more likely to find those people in the papers one thing you might notice here you see the little um i guess that's orange orange plus yes that is what we call publishers extra this is content that is from 1923 to current so it's still in copyright oh we can do a whole copyright stuff so we worked with in this case say the charlotte news to get their copyright stuff onto our site which is awesome because i mean finding i mean really when you look at finding anything recent from like 1950 on it can be really really hard and newspapers may be your best thing best way to do that but because this is still in copyright and the newspapers are very um careful about how they show that information there is an ex one extra fee that you have to pay to get all the papers that are in the plus we even have to pay it i get all my other subscriptions free this one i have to pay for well worth it well worth it but again you should check and make sure that it's something before you lay down your hard-earned money make sure it's something that you um you're gonna have to apply to you yeah right yes because i have gone in and like i was looking for an obituary for my great-grandmother was trying to figure out who her parents were sure enough the months she died that paper we didn't have it so you will always want to go check i mean but if you go here then you can see the years you can click on the year you can see the month can you zoom in just to make your screen a little bit bigger so people can see sure yes thank you is that better let's do one more and see especially for people yes okay i think that's much better okay good good yes yes yes thank you for that feedback everybody we appreciate it absolutely absolutely so but as you can see that will give you an idea now you can you're still going to want to go ahead and do searches but here let me show you another trick that you can do you see where it says here it says browse yes show us all the tricks all the tricks this is my favorite check all right so map if you're watching this you're a family historian and i know you love maps right we all love maps yes maps are the best maps are the best all right so let's go here this is all the papers we've got all over the world but like politics family history is local and hopefully not as contentious all right so here we are so i'm going to look in north and south carolina and if i just keep clicking here i will get closer and closer into what i'm looking for let's see right there we go there we go all right so in the charlotte area that's where i mean look at all these papers here right this is fascinating and years of papers just years oh i know all right so do you have any ancestors that live on a county or state line if about half the people who are watching are raising their hands probably dude okay okay all my ancestors it seems on my maternal side so it lived right in this area here okay so do you think just because they lived in north carolina in chile and south carolina newspapers of course they did because that's just the way that goes so you just keep on moving here say i know in kings mountain so i'm getting new papers that i can look at right it's like oh maybe they're in these or maybe they're over here or maybe they're down because it turns out the gaffney ledger talked about all these people all the time you'll find the page that have that information but it's going to give you the idea of where to look you you just never know you just never know also here's another trick okay let me show you one can i show you an example yes will you please show us an example and we're loving all these tricks it's fascinating okay those are good all right so this also gets back i'm just gonna show you how to do a basic search so i always start on the search page all right you'll notice on the search page you can start to type in and here's an example abraham lincoln 1865 1862 65 in illinois he wasn't in illinois okay whatever you'll see your recent searches and you'll see a search alert you can create i'll show you how to do that but you can create a search alert um and if we get more papers and we find something we'll let you know oh this is very good so we're working for you and you don't have to okay as you can see these are all canadian examples i was doing a uh a webinar for uh our canada site all right so these are just different searches that you could do all right so let's think about i'm going to search for ben donald who died in texas okay in 1818 1880 sorry so his name was benjamin donald all right there we go now remember how i told you that we aren't fielded search but you could sort of fake it that's how you do that so his name was benjamin donald i know he died in 1880 so i'm going to enter that year here all right does it say that it's a death year but this is when i want to look for it okay and i know he was living i know he died in texas here we go texas oh boy this is here we are we're on the hunt we're on the hunt we're on the hunt it's not there i'm gonna give you a clue i might also type in i i make sure that you use variations ben donald no it's not there we could page through this but trust me it's not there here's the trick often obituaries are placed not just in the local newspaper but also in the newspaper where somebody might have been born or a large part of their family lives where was mr donald born he was born in virginia so i'm going to go down here i'm sorry see this map down here yes i click on virginia and i'm going to unclick texas because i just want to look in virginia now and you'll you can also type it up there all right now if i go down here i don't want it in richmond okay i'm not finding it quite easily enough there so what i want to do is looking for a local newspaper i know we lived in lexington i'm going to go here at the newspapers and i know stanton that's pronounced stanton in virginia because it is i know that's very near lexington now again this is a canned example it took me a lot longer to do this one oh dear that's not the one but we're going to see something when you click i'm going to see something but that's not what i wanted to see oh my gosh look at that look at wait hold on hold that sewing machine there was a thousand dollar reward what was the sewing machine what was the reward gosh what did we find um one thousand dollars offered to a great range of work and do it as well as any other machinist machine as can be done on the okay i mean that this is what you're talking about the context right the ads and the comics like that's so entertaining and interesting exactly all right so i have obviously forgotten the year he was born this is really embarrassing so let's break it out just a little bit more let's see if i could up found it there it was in 1881. right who can remember dates no not me so here we go killed ben donald well known to many of our lexington people is a member of the rockbridge rifles civil war veteran should be off on a whole nother tangent there was killed in texas a few weeks ago being shot dead in the street sad yes yes so but you have to look in different places and then you're like oh who's part of the rock bridge rifles right yes if there's one place that you want to rat hole and just go off on all the different tangents it's here you can do it here so you could go up here and you want that phrase right and i bring this up because i'm putting it in double quotes which means it's going to match that phrase exactly together i don't have to find just rock bridge and rifles on one page oh my goodness so i could search here look the rock bridge rifles this is out of richmond it's a civil war thing and i won't go down that rabbit hole too much but you can start to find information about what it never mentions ben it never mentions his brother john who's also served with him but i can start to learn things about them abe lincoln can never whip such a people right so try and if you find a place they've worked your church they went to search for just that in that area and you'll find interesting things so rabbit hole all the time buying something rabbit hole rabbit a whole rabbit hole you never know what you might find okay and that's something else that you can do is you can create clippings right like if you find something we will you show us what that looks like of course all right so i want to do let's say this whole thing see up here with the little scissors where it says clip i click on that i'm going to move the box around there we go all right and then i'm going to add and i'm going to spell correctly story about rock bridge rifles always put something in here and i'll show you why in a minute okay i'm going to clip it excuse me then you can save it to ancestry save it email it to somebody you can facebook it twitter or you can embed it or you can just uh not worry about that one but one of the things i want you to know is you have to have a subscription to view the site but if you find a really cool story you can create a clipping and you can share that with anybody anybody can look at it because what we know is if you share this with your cousin they're going to be like that is the coolest thing i've ever seen and then they're going to want to subscribe because we know how this works okay okay and you have to tell us um people who work at ancestry i think you mentioned that you had a slack channel where everyone shared different interesting newspaper clippings right and i can't legal won't let me show you this like you can tell us i can tell you guys um here's just a couple that i found this morning like somebody put this one up here i don't know why but that's weird right yeah you just never know what you're gonna find or are this one you can't make this stuff up an orangutang on an elephant i think i i yeah i i don't know i don't know why but we have this slack channel i mean y'all probably um maybe you're not but with slack most companies have it in the background so we can all talk to different groups of people and there's one called newspaper clippings on ancestry and ancestry covers all their products and uh people just find stuff and they just post it in there weird funny comics stories ads you name it they post it in there it does really give the flavor to a place and a loca you know like a time and people that like you wouldn't get in you know vital records so i love that angle that you snack like can i show you an example yes newspapers can expand on a vital record yes yes yes yes we're here for it this is everyone's enjoying it and and once again we're thrilled to have anne here with us from ancestry and we're talking about newspapers.com how to search the things you can find why it's worth it and let us know what questions you have in the comments we'll we'll start getting to those in a little bit okay talk to us what are we looking at this is a marriage record on ancestry for my grandmother's second marriage her name was here she is is jenny payne turner that's her oh yeah yeah a little bit yeah yeah worse how's that is that better yeah that's better okay perfect all right so here she is and she's marrying a gentleman named william f crenshaw and by the way she lied about her age here and she lied about her age and her first marriage certificate but that's not important so i know here that they were married 25th november 1957 and in mecklenburg county north carolina okay so we should then go search for the marriage announcement right yes absolutely because now i can get details so and i've already done all the searching just to simplify but here's an article crenshaws because that's who she married in puerto rico to make home in belma they honeymooned in puerto rico that's not in the marriage certificate or unless they had a journal you would never know that then i don't have any of that stuff and it tells you the address you could go google that it tells you who the reverend was so you can go and you can match that they were married at the hawthorne lane methodist church she wore navy blue because in 1957 we didn't all wear the same things we wear now bridezillas weren't really a thing then i guess and she had white accessories and an orchid and i can just i don't care you can't and she was a very tall woman she was like five foot eleven i mean that's really tall back then especially and you know it hurt her parents that she was a member of the nursing staff at mercy hospital and that her new husband is the co-owner of william h crenshaw yarns there's so many children here right and then you can take crenshaw yarns it's like okay this man has money good job grandma and then you could go just search for wh crunch this is just articles about being a president but these are people and you can go hunt down articles about crenshaw yarns i could also search for the hospital where she was working at these are the kind of i mean if you're doing the newspapers rabbit hole rabbit hole rabbit hole you just want to anything you can think of you want to go search for it wow okay this is fascinating and i love how you started with a vital record and then you went to up to here and you took us on something that really paints a picture about your 5 foot 11 navy blue wearing orchid holding puerto rico honeymooning um relative right that's right oh much more colorful can i show you one more vital record it's all the things and we're here for all of it yes okay so and i want to show you a mistake you might make and i don't want you to make it because oh you're gonna miss it all right let's make this a little bigger okay this is great this is a great um yeah a great uncle of mine great great uncle doesn't matter isaac turner you find his death certificate he's got his parents he's got his spouse you're happy right you attach it you go on your way mistake number one so the first thing you want to do is you want to look at the cause of death every time you don't do that you will be sorry this is hard to read but it says hemorrhage of the brain from pistol shot wound oh no oh it gets worse go down on the page homicide all right we're all suddenly in law and order right yes okay so what what are you going to do you're going to go look it up in a newspaper article so i do a search for isaac turner 1937 north and south carolina because he's right on the line boy there are some headlines here aren't there isaac turner and wife were killed they were both killed oh no it gets better it gets better and worse let me go straight to this one okay here we go they're found dead in home on camp road mr turner will be buried and his by his first wife this is his second wife and she's going back to rome george remember they're both dead but here we go is the story he's sitting he's eating watermelon and in the kitchen of their home and his second wife takes a gun and shoots him in the head and i can read you more the story she then calls the cops and then she shoots herself oh my goodness oh my goodness don't you know everybody in that family was like i told you she was trouble i told you he never married her and watch this i'm gonna bring up find a grave yeah they this is her okay burial plant and they give this whole thing i found death records for mamie and her husband and confirmed she died in greenville she did more than die in greenville right mm-hmm you go over here and you look at hers and hers is a suicide the trick here though is anytime two people die on the same day yes you know you know there's a story something but if you don't look at reasons why people die there are other um you might see oh maybe they died of um smallpox or tuberculosis then you could start to search for say tuberculosis in the local newspaper in that year was there an epidemic where did people go um smallpox were there or polio or different things that might have happened again if you find that your ancestor died from that they may not be mentioned in the newspaper but you can search the newspaper from around that time and see if people were talking about it not all stories are going to be as fascinating i mean this one is fascinating and sad but if you don't look at the death certificate and then hunt down the details you miss the whole story so that's great yeah and you start you the other one was a wedding you know wedding certificate death certificate have you found this to be true with other like birth certificates other things where you can just find out more info you just never know a lot of times um it depends on the time births weren't aren't always announced but they are in some newspapers um also you should know that when it comes to uh vital records and announcing things like that um also search uh ex not now but back in the early 1900s um 1800s there was always a women's page right you know society columns women's page that kind of thing also especially down south but even up north uh african americans had their own section of the paper they weren't put with the rest of it is it horrible yes but you got to know where to go look for people and that would be one thing so you might just want to see what's going on who are the people who were the known names and on and on and on who are the famous people that you know of in the community go research them what were the businesses i mean you know you always want to go what movies were playing right if you go and you look at any paper and this is a big one but see this down let me make a look just a little bit bigger see right here where it says 12 of 24 yes another 24 pages and if you bring up the film strip it'll give you a general idea what the pages look like so if i go over here that looks like it might be comics right you can read the same comics your ancestors read wow fun yes yes yes i think that is super fun how many um i mean how far back do newspapers go good question so how would you find the answer to that um go here to papers okay oh yes we have papers and not many but from 1690 to 2020 and if you go here and you just sort of let's update it here is the one paper we have from 1690. oh can you show us of course oh my goodness i mean look at that right wow i mean you may not have anybody in this paper but if you're a student of history and we all are yes this is just interesting right it's fascinating um oh and you see all these blue lines yeah what are those things that's somebody's made a clipping okay so if you click on it you'll see the people who have clipped it 1690 article about thanksgiving wow 1690 is the first um okay so if if what about like when people can go to libraries and local places how can they find out about what's available at libraries because a lot of them have newspapers that people can look at right what do you recommend for that situation um so if your library has newspapers you will most um libraries have a way that you can get in like if you have like a number on your card or barcode or something they'll let you log in and then you can see also newspapers at home you could call your library and ask a lot of libraries on the page will list all the different things they have um and we may not have a light or your library may not have newspapers.com or maybe we just don't have papers for your area at that time i would start by calling the local library i know we have some of the papers for lexington virginia but we don't have all of them but i know the library has microphone for all of them if you have a really well-crafted question like you can't just say okay my ancestor was john smith who did he marry they're not gonna know but if you're like i know my ancestor john smith died in 1903 and he was buried because i know from find a grave in the lexington cemetery can you check to see if there's an obituary for him that's pretty specific and when they get the time of a lot of the librarians will go and try and look this stuff up for you or better yet or at least they can say look i can't i don't have time to do this but we have microphone from this year to this year and next time you're on a road trip then you know to go looking so yeah okay the super good tip because not everything i mean that's the point right not everything's available everywhere and that's great also um check places like allen county library um uh the houston library has just tons and tons also the state libraries are also our archives are also a good place to to call and ask what they have available because they may have stuff that we don't have usually we do because we work with most of them but um they may have stuff that we've not been able to digitize yet so and we have like billions of pages or hundreds of millions of pages but it takes time and we're going slower right now so yeah tell us a little bit about how has um how have things been different at ancestry in your role or in people that work with you on on newspapers with with covet and you're you're not working in an office what is that like for you guys they shut down all our us offices in march so we most people could not go in i know that we have offices also in dublin and in london and those have been shut down and opened for various times uh so all of us were said you got to work from home um and we're an internet company so we're managing but there are some exceptions the uh utah office which is in lehigh um right up the point of the mountain if you guys live in utah you know what i'm talking about um they have allowed a small percentage of people to go in and in that is included some of the people who work on newspapers because the scanning and the all the stuff that they do has to be done on very um you know they're expensive high quality machines that you can't bring home with you oh wow so you know we've had to do different stuff with different shifts and all that kind of stuff and have make sure people are socially distanced and everything you have to take care of people and ancestry has been doing a great job of that oh that's so that's good to know um okay but we have managed to add last month six million new pages so they're done that's awesome okay we have a question and this one is shelley and she is really curious about places from some of her her jewish ancestors in other countries so i don't know if you have an answer for her but would you show us i know we saw more the the map but can and you showed us a world view but can you talk about the other locations you have information for we currently my guess is your ancestors if they're not in the us they came from europe eastern europe europe russia yes russia newspapers we do not have i don't know who wants them um we i can't give away anything new and specific but we are always working on international content because we know that um in if you live here in the us you've always got somebody that came from someplace else so we are always working on getting more international content um if you i don't know the answer specifically on jewish but i do know somebody who might know the answer and is there a place where i could post later if i find out anything yes yes and i can um i can also get shelly's um info to you as well just maybe shelly in the comments drop your email if you're comfortable or send family search a message with that um and she says bless you and thank you but um and the person the person i'll reach out to is krista cowan i you guys yes krista yes is just if she's my go-to person when i ever have like the world right yeah yeah exactly but she she really under she knows um how to do uh research for people with jewish heritage and uh you know you know what you know and you know what you don't know yes and then when you know someone who knows you're you're you're you're great but this was really interesting though because i see some other locations listed um so these are the other countries that you currently have papers for right right i mean we have like a large collection of english ireland northern ireland not too many i don't know how we ended up with panama that one just oh well i guess we are there's a u.s portion of that scotland canada you know okay all sorts of different but like i said look always go look and see what's there before you and once you find that it has something that is going to cover your time um yeah then you'll you'll spend hours just hours hours we're talking amongst friends there okay amy has a question and um she has an ancestor with the famous name that lived in the same area as the famous named person but is not famous in the same time period so i like for example johnny cash who lived in the same county as the actual johnny cash in the same time period is there any recommendations for um amy great question amy it is a great question and there may or may not be a good answer um one thing you can do is when you go to search let's say that you were looking for i'll just pick a random name here john smith okay and the famous person is captain john smith so what you can do is say minus captain and what it will do is it'll find the phrase john smith i put it in double quotes you can do that or not and any page that has the word captain on it it won't show me that page okay that's really helpful um hold on my computer thinks it needs to reboot okay i avoided that problem okay good we don't want to do that let me show you while we're here don't forget to check out obituaries and marriages we have gone through and we've worked with our crackerjack data scientists and they've come up with all these really fascinating new algorithms and you can just search obituaries or marriages oh that's such a convenient experience isn't it oh yes and the indexes are also on ancestry so you can search the index on ancestry and to find that let me show you you go to ancestry come on don't be slow oh thank you it's always slow when you're demoing go to card catalog here we go type in newspapers.com and you will see the three indexes we have we have look at that 800 million obituaries indexed wow that's amazing okay we're getting we're getting a ton of questions are you good for a few more um okay uh and let me look and see the name of this gentleman as i'm scrolling through here you guys these are great doug asks what steps can be taken to encourage a newspaper to participate his hometown paper in wyoming does not currently participate so is there something that doug can do to say okay talk to us what does that look like right now we go for the low-hanging fruit so anything that's on microfilm or maker fish we're really interested in if we have to scan the papers that's a much more laborious task so if those papers are on microsoft or microfilm microsoft microfilm or micro fish there is a let me see if you go to ancestry academy and that's also another um uh ancestry property and these are all our videos and you do search oh and you'll find lots of um [Music] together oh here we go newspapers.com institution partners ties content um the fifth one minute it would give you um an idea and i better not i want to start that it would give you da libraries content digi broken but um ancestry academy is a really great make sure that video is still up and nothing's wrong but uh it's a really great place just to go and see what videos we have we have all sorts of videos by all sorts of people so okay here's another one let's see betsy wants to know if there's a good way to search for social mentions of your ancestors within certain newspapers or articles so i'm assuming like the society pages and things like that right so a couple of things you could do uh let's see when you go to search you probably know what i would search within a specific time frame i would pick um the name i'm gonna go here to paper i know uh a name just i would do it paper by paper okay and i would you can then browse by date or what you can do is um yeah you can search that paper and let's say you know that you're just looking in the 1960s right so you could type in the date there and then you could just search for whoever you know jane smith or whatever her name is um do it there or you can just go through different papers because every papers usually had social mentions um on the same specific page and you could just browse them that way uh and that is a really good point i'm betsy i think brought that up because um a lot of times especially in rural areas you'll just find these little mentions mrs william crenshaw and her sister went to visit her brother off in alabama and that will be it and remember with women they were often referred to as mrs whatever their husband's name was they didn't have a first name but whatever so you got to think about how to search for that as well okay and you answered someone else's question and i don't know if it's the same betsy but she wanted to know how to search just obituaries and just marriages so that was awesome and so much fun with those um this was interesting larry is saying he has seen um the phrase captain has been incorporated appearing to be part of the given name is that something you've seen in newspapers and i'm not sure if he's referring to newspaper so larry you might want to clarify um sometimes sometimes you'll just see captain smith or okay and so here's another trick just because somebody referred to themselves as captain or colonel that doesn't mean they were ever a captain or a colonel sometimes people just assume they could make it up and they're being interviewed or photographed or something our ancestors never inflated their position in life but it does happen right we don't we don't know anyone that does that today right okay as we are um wrapping up i just want to know what has been your favorite discovery you've made or maybe maybe memorable discovery you've made um just just researching in newspapers one of the things that i just found really interesting um is i put i was putting together a talk on uh textile mills in the south like i mentioned i'm i have a lot of southern research and it was just researching the stories of people who worked in the mills and you would find pictures and you would find layouts of the mills and about this fire in that fire so i was just finding this whole history that of the people of my ancestors who were working in these places and i suddenly had this new concept of what they had to do and what they lived through and how a certain event just suddenly changed their whole lives and you don't get that out of the census record right you'll never see that but you see it because you researched those little tidbits you find in vitals and synthesis and all those other things yes okay and i think one thing to show i love that i love and my experience with mills is you know the bbc show north and south which you know i may just have to watch it but before we um before we wrap up will you show us the clip beans piece because that was something i think that's really interesting and valuable okay so i showed you all how to make a clipping right yes and when you make a clipping if you click up here on clippings you'll see i have 641. yes you are i'm dedicated i'm dedicated well and every time i'm researching a talk or whatever i just throw stuff in here so you see how i um i put a title this is a story about rock bridge rifles i can search find every in all my clippings anywhere that i mentioned say rock bridge perfect so it's like tags it's exactly like that so i can do that um and these clippings then um let's go back this one's good enough a couple of things you'll find um i worked with news the newspapers team we um wrote the um a citation okay copy that citation you don't have to think about it um you can save it to ancestry you can edit all your little data in here you can print it you can download it it downloads it a pdf or you can send it and if you uh if you share it let's say via email it'll just send a link to the person and they'll get into your clipping and they can see everything you okay wow and if you make your clippings public like i do um and there's a setting you can let's see see here this little gear thing yes if you click on gear you can say public and make it public so people can find those uh those clippings and like here i just randomly the bristol herald courier i can see what are people flipping that can be interesting usually really small town papers because they may be people who are researching the same thing you are right i mean look at this one here's a marriage and it's got her picture of her wedding dress all right that is gold oh and look if you went to the actual page yes the diamonds okay i know but look at that that ring was 200 this one was 50. i wonder what size ring she had i hope he splurged on her right oh my goodness yes yes awesome yes think about it right think about what kind of things they paid for how much was it for bread all that kind of stuff well and i think um what you've described for us today is it's really the the image that keeps coming into my mind newspapers are black and white but really they add color to the characters in your family history in their lives and it gives you a sense of who they were and and sort of what their experience was like and i think that helps to build empathy and understanding and all of those really meaningful things that are important um and you are so much fun and now um what what sort of final message would you like to share with our guests before we sign off and i'm going to have you full screen so people can see your face one of the things that i like to do is i like to go look at the headlines and the front pages from when my ancestors lived especially through um uh really notable events whether it be world war ii go look at your local papers when pearl harbor was born go look at what the paper was saying when the civil war started it's going to be really really different if you lived in south carolina than if you lived in new york you know everybody talks about how divided we are it was worse but put yourself in their shoes i mean we don't always agree or whatever but i was just looking at like the whole pearl harbor thing and i was just trying i mean you could check the weather that day what was happening were they at church when they found out there were usually two or three papers a day back then when big things happen what did they read and how is it presented to them it it it just gives you a different perspective it's one thing to read it in a history book it's another thing to read it like your ancestors were reading it oh yes it's all about context and that's what newspapers bring us they really make our ancestors come to life and you as you pointed out to me it adds the color of their life yes well and thank you thank you so much and i will um this this is available so everyone who's participating we love having you um and what uh just phenomenal conversation and learning and i feel i feel like i i want to go watch north and south and also find some newspapers and look at some of those ads so thank you everybody thank you and

Channel: FamilySearch

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Id: UQDfm00UQeQ

Length: 55min 0sec (3300 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020