Google has made the announcement that it will soon stop updating its newspaper archiving project. This decision could, perhaps, be so that Google can work on other, newer, projects instead. What does this change mean for genealogists, who rely on newspaper archives for their research?
Newspapers, especially older newspapers, are an excellent resource for genealogists. One of the main reasons why a genealogist would choose to hunt down a copy of a newspaper from decades ago would be to read the obituaries. You can learn quite a bit about an ancestor simply by reading over his or her obituary. Obviously, it will have the full name of your ancestor, as well as his or her date of birth and date of death. An obituary also lists some of the names of the person’s relatives. This gives genealogists some clues about how that particular ancestor fits into their family tree.
If you are lucky, the obituary will be long, and will describe important details of your ancestor’s life. It might talk about his or her military service, the degrees the person earned when he or she was in school, or noteworthy awards the person won.
Many newspapers today have websites where people can go to read the current news. This is a fairly recent development in terms of newspapers. Most of the online versions of newspapers have an archive, but not one that goes very far back. I don’t think that all newspapers that appear in an online accessible version always contain obituaries, either.
The Google News Archive Search project was started in 2008, and it has since scanned around 2,000 newspapers. Simply type what you are searching for into the box, and click the “search archives” button. This gives you all links to the relevant newspaper articles that can be found within the Google News Archives. It also gives you an interesting timeline, which is automatically generated, that shows a bar graph that compares the number of times the subject you entered was mentioned in a given decade.
To access information, just click on one of the links. This allows you to view a digitally scanned copy of the actual newspaper. Use the arrows at the top of the window to move around the newspaper page. If I remember correctly, microfiche works in a similar way. You view a small portion of the newspaper at one time, and then shift it over as needed.
Soon, Google will stop updating it’s newspaper archiving project. What does this mean for genealogists? The existing archive is going to stay. Don’t panic, it is not about to disappear from the internet, forever. You will still be able to access the newspapers that have already been scanned, and added into, the archive.
Google just won’t be adding any more newspapers to the archive. It also won’t be introducing any new features to this archive, or improving its functionality from this point on. It is not known what will become of the newspapers that were sent to Google for the purpose of being included into this project that have not been scanned or added yet.
Image by ShironekoEuro on Flickr