Newspapers: Revisiting Resources

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

​The theme of this month seems to be revisiting resources! I’ve talked about reviewing information that you’ve discovered in the past. It also is good for us to revisit resources that we used. Here are a few that have helpful updates. Let’s look.

​I’ve mentioned my Luxembourg ancestors before. You can manually search through the Luxembourg Gazette which has been a great resource. I have recently discovered that Chronicling America Newspapers has included several ethnic historical newspapers. One of these is the Luxembourg Gazette. I find this particularly helpful because now I can do a search by name and year. The Library of Congress > Chronicling America > Luxemburger gazette. 
 
The most recent issue of Internet Genealogy contains an article by Diane L. Richard called Tableau. One of the links she provided Chronicling America Ethnic Press Coverage (Map) | Tableau Public provides an ethnic map of the newspapers featured in Chronicling America. Isn’t that cool? Like the Luxemburger Gazette, most ethnic newspapers are in the language of our ancestors. So, you will need to use tools like Google Translate to figure out what the articles say. You will likely need to find the font type used to help you identify letters in the print. For example, the old German font used in the Luxemburger Gazette.
 
Tableau is an interesting tool for looking at data. Here is another link that provides you with various views of Chronicling America: Profile - chronicling.america | Tableau Public. Take some time to view newspaper data in a new way. One particular report caught my eye because the title is “It’s Always a Bad Time to be to be a Blacksmith”. I come from a long line of blacksmiths, but I guess they did ok in their time. The report was created to show the popularity of various careers across time.
 
It is fun to look at data in a new way and if it helps us to view our family data and research differently, we can produce innovative ideas and resources to move our family story. Enjoy exploring!