Digitization of documents is becoming more pervasive and
more easily accessible to the public. Newspapers
along with other records used in genealogical research are being digitized as
well. Sites such as the Library of Congress offers free access to a selection of digitized newspapers. This collection seems limited to those
newspapers published before the early 1920’s, which has put a limit to what I
can find about some of my Womble ancestors.
I’ve tried other means of locating the information I’ve been
looking for such as obituaries of my great grandfather, Albert Womble’s
siblings. One of my successes involved
finding an obit that had been put on the site Photobucket and there I was able
to make contact with a distant cousin who had posted several pictures and
articles about the Womble family.
While I was at RootsTech this year, I considered the
possibility of using the site Newspapers.com to search for news articles from
the Savannah Courier a newspaper published Savannah,
Tennessee which is the county seat of Hardin County, Tennessee. Previously, at the Family History Library I
had found the book by Tony Hays, No Man’s
Land: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Hardin County. The preface stated that the book is a
compilation of articles that were originally published in Savannah
Courier. The book mentioned a lot of
events and accounts of happenings in Hardin
County before and after
the Civil War. However, I wasn’t sure
what to do with the information since the author didn’t include more detailed
sources other than that the information came from the Savannah Courier. I talked with another genealogist while in Salt Lake City about my
findings in Tony Hays’ book and what searching I could do to verify or if I
should verify the information in his book.
I was encouraged to attempt to verify the information and told that what
needed to be done was to attempt to track down issues of the Savannah Courier
and read them to correlate the information in Hays’ book with the articles in
the newspaper.
This led me to talk to the folks at the Newspapers.com booth
and see if the Savannah Courier was a newspaper that they had in their
collection. Unfortunately it wasn’t,
however this didn’t cause me to completely disregard the usefulness of the
website.
Sometimes research ideas come to me indirectly. I happened to be looking through my newsfeed
on Facebook, where I’ve joined a few genealogy groups. One of these the Tennessee GenealogicalSociety posted an article about finding maiden names for ancestors. The article brought up searching newspapers
for maiden names and someone commented on searching for digitized records on
the site Missouri Digital Heritage. This
set off the thought in my mind to search for digitized California newspapers for the obituary of
Albert Womble’s brother, Thomas J. Womble.
I had tried to find San
Bernardino, California
newspapers available at various universities, but had always come up empty
handed.
This new idea of searching for digitized San Bernardino, California
newspapers led me to the site, California Digital Newspaper Collection. They didn’t have what I was looking for so I wound
up googling “digitized San Bernardino Sun” and came across this newspaper
available on the Newspapers.com site.
I was able to search the site to see if the time period I
was interested in was available and it was.
Previous research I’d done on Thomas had given me a clue as to his death
date.
My goal was to obtain a death
certificate for him, but I’m sure that this won’t be available to me due to California’s strict
privacy laws. Also, I was hoping that an
obituary would give me more information about his life and the Womble
family.
I signed up for the free 7 day trial and was able to find
Thomas’ obituary in the San Bernardino
Sun. The clipping tool was fairly
straightforward to use and I could then download and/or print the image. After downloading it, I saved the image to my
computer and for those of you who are regular readers of my blog, yes, I
entered the search into my research log and wrote a citation for the obit—so
I’m following my new system.
I considered going ahead and becoming a regular subscriber
to Newspapers.com, but eventually decided against it. The reason being while I loved the clipping,
downloading, and saving features on the site, the functionality of these worked
great for me and were better than what’s available on the Library of Congress’
digitized newspapers area, ‘Chronicling America.’ The truth is you can’t beat the
cost of free stuff. Also, I didn’t find
the search feature to be any better or worse than the Library of Congress. Yes, there is the limitation of not being
able to search more recent newspapers on their site, but my focus is on mainly
on older newspapers. Perhaps, I will
become a subscriber of Newspapers.com in the future if their collection comes
to include more newspapers from Hardin County, Tennessee; Massac County,
Illinois (specifically the Metropolis Planet); and a greater variety of Nashville
newspapers.
My free trial of the service did cause me to locate some
real gems. Such as the court case,
Womble vs. Womble listed in an 1874 Nashville
paper, delinquent tax lists from 1910 that listed my great grandfather, Albert
Womble. Finding him listed on these
lists gave me more insight into his life as single father in Paducah and it wasn’t surprising to find him
in such a list. However, it was
surprising to see the extent of his struggle with single parenthood after the
death of his wife and how this seeped into other areas of his life.
