Ten Ways to Use Newspapers.com to Gain Historical Perspective

Anne Gillepsie Mitchell is the driving source behind Ask Ancestry Anne - her own blog on Ancestry.com.  Yes, another bog - I told you the Internet was saturated with them!  She recently posted on how to use Newspapers.com to help you gain historical perspective. (By the way, if you are an Ancestry.com subscriber, you can get a subscription to Newspapers.com for half-price.  That would mean half-off the annual subscription rte of $79.95 or the monthly rate of $7.95.)  Anne's premise is that reading the newspapers your ancestors read will give you a lot of insight into their lives at any given point in time.   This is a very powerful tool to harness.

Some of the things she focuses on in using this research are:

1.  Front Page Headline
2.  Vital Information on births, marriages and deaths
3.  Local gossip - look at the Society News page(s)
4.  Editorials, editorial cartoons and other musing about the issues of the day
5.  The comics
6.  Movie listings
7.  Classifieds - how much did it cost to live, how much did people earn, what did it cost to buy or rent a home
8.  Shopping - you can learn a lot of the adds for clothing and merchandise

You can check out Anne's original, illustrated post by clicking here.

So go read a newspaper your grandfather may have read - you'll be surprised by what you'll learn.

-- submitted by Denise Doyon


Originally posted by Anne Gillespie MItchell on 10 Oct 2013 in Ask Ancestry Ann, Family History Month