Ancestry Newspapers

#NotAtRootstech

Did you catch Crista Cowan’s ‘What’s New at Ancestry‘ session at RootsTech 2024? One of the new features is their use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to index newspapers. In the past, Ancestry had an index to the obituaries and the marriage announcements found in the newspapers on Newspapers.com. WIth this new technology, the ‘gossip’ columns are also indexed. Thus, it is possible to find articles about family reunions, births or even Sunday dinners.

To access this new tool, one has to go to a new URL: ancestry.com/newspapers.

While one might want to click on the map, the pull down ‘Search by state or territory’ button must be used. When that is clicked on, a list of the states appears.

It is also possible to search the obituaries or marriage records from this page by using the ‘Search by Category’ button.

When I searched by state and clicked on KANSAS, it opened a search box for KANSAS newspapers.

As an experiment, I searched for the surname MENTZER.

With over 11,000 results, I decided to narrow my search down to Woodson County where my Mentzer ancestor first settled.

That search reduced the number of results but it was still found over 900 articles.

Knowing that my ancestor, George Mentzer, who settled in Woodson county had six sons with many of their descendants remaining in the Woodon county area, it does not surprise me that there are that many newspaper articles. Unfortunately, the newer papers are yet to be digitized. Thus, these articles are just part of what the newspaper has to offer about the Mentzer family in Woodson County, Kansas.

Going back to my search of the entire state for the Mentzer surname, the first article listed was for Paul Mentzer. Since my grandmother’s twin brother was named Paul, I decided to look at this article even though it wasn’t from Woodson county to discover that it was for my grandmother’s twin.

Since I tend to restrict my newspaper searches to the county where they lived, I doubt I would have found this short article about Paul E. Mentzer if I had not been experimenting with this new tool.

While everyone with the Mentzer surname in Woodson county is likely a cousin, the same can’t be said for the CRAWFORDs in Ford county.

Even though the search for Crawford in Ford county turned up over 2,000 articles, there are likely bits of family information in some of these articles that I doubt I would find any other way. For example, it found a 1932 article for J. F. Crawford, a 1903 article for Judd Crawford and a 1907 article for Mrs. Crawford. All of those articles about my great grandfather and my great-great grandmother. Even though I do a lot of newspaper research, I likely would not have uncovered these articles without this new tool from Ancestry.

Check it out for yourself and see what you can discover!