Searching
Old Newspapers – compiled by Ken Gottry (ken@gottry.com) Sep-2022
Background: A gentleman in Fulton NY started a website years ago to display postcards of his hometown. He soon expanded to include old Fulton newspapers. Then he added an online search capability. As his popularity grew, other communities asked if he could scan their old newspapers. Today, his website has over 50 million newspaper pages from the U.S. and Canada.
Our local newspaper started in Salem on January 1, 1798, first as the Northern Centennial, later Northern Post, and finally the Washington County Post. When the paper's owner ran into financial difficulties in 1848, Robert Young purchased it and moved it to the Aaron Crosby store in North White Creek (the East End of Cambridge).
Young issued the first number on March 15, 1849 with North White Creek, not Cambridge, listed on the masthead. Until its last edition around 1990 the masthead proclaimed it was the oldest weekly newspaper in America.
In the 1990’s old copies of the Washington County Post were converted to microfilm. The Library and the Village Offices each had a microfilm reader and printer. In the 2000’s, the microfilm was sent to Fulton NY where the newspapers were loading onto the searchable website.
The Website: The main page of the website is located at … https://fultonhistory.com/. I start my searching at item #1 (Go and Search My Archives) … https://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html. Also useful is item #3 (Go to my Help and FAQ section).
Tom Tryniski, the owner and operator of the website has an amazing data center that he maintains through donations. State and ancestry organizations use and reference Tom’s website extensively. As such, they make major financial contributions. However, individual contributions are also welcome. You can use item #4 (Click here to donate) if you find the site useful.
Getting started: How to search the old newspapers
Your first inclination is to simply type the name you’re looking for into the search box. Since my last name isn’t that common, I expect to get only a few hits.
However, at the bottom of the search page, I see an index of 81 hits. I’ve shown 2 here. One from a Utica newspaper from 1880 and another from the Salem newspaper from 1981.
· I find lots of other Gottry’s than the one I am looking for
· I forgot that there are many other newspapers besides our Washington County Post
· I forgot that this website has newspapers from the early 1800s to present
Let’s see how to narrow the search
Be sure the dropdown box says Boolean. Then I can type lots of search criteria using AND logic. I know most pages have the name of the newspaper, so I’ll search for pages that say Washington County Post and Gottry. I put double quotation marks around “Washington County Post”. Otherwise, I will get all pages that have the word Washington, which include the General, the Capital, the State, and so on
If I get really detailed (e.g. search for “Kenneth A Gottry”), I will miss lots of matches. For example, if there is a period after the middle initial “A”. Or if the article says “Kenneth Gottry” without the middle initial. Or, if the article says “Ken Gottry”. Or, if the newspaper was blurred when scanned and the optical character recognition (OCR) software thought the “o” in Gottry was an “a”. You can try checking Fuzzy Search and setting the fuzziness to 2 or so
Try using characters that are close to other
characters (within NN characters)
But there’s a better way. Use the “within” search option. Here I’m saying the newspaper page must contain the phrase “Washington County Post” and it must contain the letters “Ken” within 5 words of “Gottry” (notice there are no double quotation marks around this). I’ll find Kenneth, Kenneth A, Ken. I can also check Fuzzy Search and add some fuzziness to the matching process
Search using Date Range:
One final searching tip, use a date range. Add one more AND to the end of the search with this syntax … and (Filename Contains (1950~~1968)). It specifies the date range to be searched. Note the filenames of our newspapers doesn’t always match exactly the year. For example, a Jan-1949 newspaper might be scanned with the 1948 newspaper files. So, give yourself some latitude when searching
The Results: Underneath the search criteria you will see the results. The search engine *tries* to display some useful text from each matching page, but it’s rarely helpful. Look at the Percent Match column. The top entry is 100% matching everything I searched for. The second entry matches 96% and so on
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