The following is a press release written by MyHeritage:
We’re happy to announce the publication of four huge new collections of names and stories on MyHeritage, extracted from newspaper pages on OldNews.com. The collections contain 658 million records from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; 998 million records from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska; 1 billion records from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; and 651 million records from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia.
The new collections are searchable on MyHeritage, with the full images of the newspaper pages available on OldNews.com via direct links from MyHeritage.
This treasure trove of genealogical information is just the beginning: these are the first four of 16 similar collections that we are planning to publish in December 2024. The full suite of collections, covering the entire United States and several additional countries, will collectively add more than 10 billion records to MyHeritage’s historical database, expanding it by 50%!
As part of this update, we’re also thrilled to share that OldNews.com now hosts more than 300 million newspaper pages!
Search the new collections now:
Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi
Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska
Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia
The importance of newspapers for genealogy
Vital records like births, marriages, and deaths, are the important building blocks of genealogy, providing names, dates, places and relationships. However, they are typically bare bones and offer no color about the lives of one’s ancestors, their personalities, achievements and hardships. By contrast, historical newspapers are much richer, more detailed, and they do provide all the juicy details that vital records lack, including, in some cases, photographs. Newspaper articles offer glimpses into the daily lives, accomplishments, and challenges of individuals from generations past. For genealogists, newspapers often hold the missing pieces of family puzzles: Obituaries describe the person’s life history and impact on the local community; Community news articles bring to life the context of your ancestors’ lives: where they lived, worked, and contributed to society; Local achievements offer insights into their personalities and legacies. There are many other types of stories that can add much color to the family tree.
What’s special about the new collections
Despite their importance, historical newspapers have often been difficult to search effectively. With MyHeritage’s cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, we’ve turned this underutilized resource into a goldmine of genealogical information.
The new collections allow MyHeritage users to uncover rich information about their ancestors that was previously out of reach. This is because they are indexed and structured, so they can be searched using imprecise names, nicknames and synonyms; whereas searching in newspapers that are not indexed (i.e. raw text, like articles published online that are searchable by Google) is typically done using keywords and requires the user to write the name exactly as it appears in the newspaper.
For example, if your ancestor was named Frederick, you can now find him in an important newspaper article on MyHeritage even if you search for him by the name of Fred and he happens to be mentioned in that newspaper with his original name of Friedrich.
As another example, if a newspaper article describes a marriage that took place “on Wednesday last week”, MyHeritage will analyze the publication date of the article and understand and store the full date of the marriage, allowing you to find it by date. This would not have been possible if you had been searching solely based on keywords mentioned in the article.
As a third example, if an article is about Mr. Wilson and further below it mentions that his wife was named Maggie, MyHeritage will understand that a person named Maggie Wilson exists and index it, and users will be able to find that article when searching for her name.
For these reasons, the new index collections are not only easy to search but also create an excellent foundation for MyHeritage’s powerful matching technologies. Users with a family tree on MyHeritage will soon receive exciting matches with the new collections, notifying them about articles in which their ancestors and relatives appear without having to search for them manually.
The structured records in the new collections were extracted from nearly 200 million English newspaper pages using cutting-edge AI technology developed by the MyHeritage team. This AI is designed to extract not just names from the newspaper articles but also the relatives of every person mentioned, as well as additional fields such as occupations, residences, travel from one location to another, and more.
You can read much more at: https://tinyurl.com/dw59yjcd.