I was recently asked by a fellow member of our genealogical society how to print articles found in newspapers at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website. I decided to demonstrate using an article I found for the ROBBINS family in Stevens County, Washington in the early twentieth century. I myself lived in Stevens County from 1979 through 1984, and my parents still live there. We mistakenly thought we were the first of our family to live in the area, but some research proved that Benjamin Leander "Lee" ROBBINS, brother of my 3rd-great-grandfather, Charles H. ROBBINS, lived there from at least 1910 until his death in 1929. His wife, Florine DUTTON, as well as their surviving children, Perry C., Charlotte L. "Lotta", and Odell, all lived in Washington State as well, Perry and Lotta being married adults when they came out West. An infant, Lee, died in Michigan prior to the ROBBINS' migration.
My first step was to search for the ROBBINS family in the Colville Examiner at the Chronicling America site. The Examiner was the precursor to today's Statesman-Examiner, a newspaper I read during my teen years when I lived in the Colville area. I tried various search terms, and the one that was most successful was when I used the phrase "lee robbins" without quotations in the Exact Phrase search:
This search yielded four results:
I clicked on the third image and received the following view of the page:
Next, I clicked on the Zoom + button in the toolbar menu above the window to zoom in. Notice that you can see the search term highlighted in red the whole time:
Next I clicked on the Draw Zoom Box tool. This allowed me to draw a "frame" around just the article I wanted:
When I clicked the Zoom + button again, I was able to zoom in on just the article:
To print, I chose the Print icon from the toolbar:
Notice that the red highlights disappear for easy-to-read black-and-white printing:
To download this image to my computer to save it, choose the Download Image button:
The Chronicling America website is a wonderful one, and should be bookmarked by every genealogist! This site will eventually have newspapers from every state in the union!
7 comments:
Thanks for the link to this wonderful site and for information on how to print and save. I've searched but haven't found any ancestors yet.
Miriam, Thank you so much for this post. I was not aware of this site or how many digitized newspapers were available through LOC. I research in Kentucky a lot and was especially pleased to see they have a 10-yr run of the Adair County News.
I love the Chronicling America website. I've blogged about it three times this week. However, your post is invaluable in explaining how to print out a small portion of the newspaper page. Bravo!
Miriam,
Thanks for the "walk thru", very helpful. I played around with the Chronicling America site --- oooo, it could be addictive.
BTW is your Colville, near Pullman, Washington? We were at WSU for 6 years -- BA, BS, and DVM. I did come to love that area.
I was so excited to learn about the site until I noticed Wisconsin wasn't listed. :) Though, there is some family in some of those states. Thanks for the link.
Thank you all for dropping by and leaving your kind words. If you liked what you see at Chronicling America, check out my Online Historic Newspapers website here.
Joan, Pullman is in SE Washington; Colville is in NE Washington; they're about a 3 1/2 hour drive from each other through Spokane.
Brian, I haven't (yet) found Wisconsin newspapers online, but I haven't searched for them, either. Stay tuned to my newspaper site (link above) and I'll let you know when I've found them.
Brian, check out this link. Also, don't forget to check out subscription websites such as Footnote, Ancestry, GenealogyBank and NewspaperArchives. You may discover one of them has access to a lot of newspapers for your ancestral locations and time periods and it may be worth it to pay for a trial period or even a regular subscription!
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