The Historical Role of Newspapers

With all the genealogical resources available to you, why should you take the time to research newspapers? As we discussed in the introduction, newspapers can provide information that no other record type can, presenting you with unique opportunities to breathe life into your family's story. And since newspapers were the social media of their time, they document the everyday lives of your ancestors and their communities.

This chapter will discuss the historical role of newspapers, giving you some foundations of how more than three centuries of newspaper publishing have played out in America. We'll also discuss how time and place affect your genealogy research, plus how you can make your way through the rest of this book.

RESEARCHING TIME AND PLACE

Anyone working on family history needs to be familiar with genealogy's first principles, such as researching specific questions (to keep research from being scattershot), working backward in time (instead of assuming a distant person with the same surname is automatically an ancestor, only to waste time and effort), and practicing "whole family" genealogy (studying records relating to siblings of direct-line ancestors for the information it can add).

But probably the paramount principle when starting a newspaper search is grounding yourself in the proper "time and place" of the people or events you are searching. Just as the history of newspapers in this chapter will help inoculate you from "presentism," using time and place — the date or era in which you are searching and the geographic (or, in some cases, ethnographic) area being researched — will keep you right on target in your genealogical and historical research. Knowing when and where an event took place is essential to finding records of it, and an event's time and place form a sort of crosshairs that allow you to target genealogy resources. Without historical context about the time era and geographic place you are researching, you won't know what records are available or when they began, causing you to miss out on records or waste time researching records that were never created.

The time and place you're researching will be narrow or broad, depending on what you're searching for. Time might refer to just one day or possibly a whole decade, while place could range from a borough in a large city to a whole country.

Let's take a look at the genealogical time-and-place intersect in action. Keep in mind the historical realities of the time and place you're researching in. If your research goal is a "California state birth certificate from 1879," you are likely to be disappointed, as the state did not begin registration of births and deaths until July 1905. Changing the goal to a "Record showing birth in California in 1879," on the other hand, opens up possibilities such as births written down by county recorders and church registers of infant baptisms — as well as mentions of births in newspapers.

But what if you want to look at "Documents from Edgar County, Illinois, in 1820"? Well, my research tells me Edgar County wasn't created until 1823. As a result, any records relating to those who became Edgar County residents will likely be in its parent, Clark County. Likewise, if you want to look for a Clark County, Illinois, ancestor's land in 1820 and later, be prepared for a lot of searching. A dozen-plus counties were later cut from Clark County's original territory (basically the whole northeastern portion of the state!), so you'll have a lot more land to search than just today's relatively compact Clark County. The description of the property in that pre-1820 Clark County deed likely will be helpful in determining in which modern county the property is located.

By "aiming" the crosshairs, you can hopefully avoid the aforementioned presentism, and you will have to re-aim with every ancestor. Often, you'll have to recalibrate in different parts of one ancestor's life. You have to know your history to aim those crosshairs correctly!

So how does this apply to newspaper research? You need to recalibrate your genealogy crosshairs for each new ancestor or family you're researching, as newspaper coverage and availability varied from place to place and across time. One important way this manifests itself today is that newspapers that are large and influential in a community now may not have always been that way, as the pre-eminent news source in a community will not necessarily have had the same role during the era being researched. That current newspaper might not have even existed during that earlier time, or it may have been an upstart afterthought versus a then-dominant-but-now-defunct title. Or you may have to do some research on the newspaper's own "genealogy" if it has gone through multiple titles or mergers or owners.

Looking at things from the "place" end of the crosshairs, what is now a substantial community previously might have been served by a geographically zoned "edition" of another town's newspaper (or just even a "column" in that other town's newspaper). The small community of your ancestor could have been part of the "territory" of the newspaper published in its county seat … or even a paper in a different county, often dependent upon proximity (both in terms of actual mileage as well as connections through valleys in some areas).

HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS

Print media have been a forceful tool since Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the European continent more than half a millennium ago, with books (especially religious works such as the Bible), one-page broadsheets, magazines, templates for personal documents, educational materials, sheet music, comic books, and more having a huge impact. But it's hard to overstate the ubiquity of newspapers, in particular, as the chief source of information around the world (not to mention their utility in birdcages and as bedding for farm animals). No other category of printed matter has reached more people, more often since the first attempts at newspapers were made in Europe in the early 1600s. This is especially true in America, where so many communities founded daily newspapers beginning in the mid- 1800s. Even today, as the newspaper audience becomes increasingly digital, tens of millions of Americans — and hundreds of millions of people around the world — continue to...