Finding New York State Newspaper Articles and Obituaries on the Free FultonHistory.com Site
If you do research in New York and haven't used fultonhistory.com, or have tried to use it and have been frustrated please read on. If you don't do research in New York or already find a lot of good articles and obituaries on the site, then you can stop reading now.
FultonHistory.com is a private site that contains a large number of newspaper images in pdf form from all over the state of New York. And it's free! I have found hundreds of important death notices, obituaries and articles in the newspapers on this site, but when I first tried using the site I got frustrated. So my goal with this post is to share some of the techniques that have worked for me in hopes that they might work for you.
Areas Represented on the Site
From the latest downloadable index of the site there are over 55 counties represented with at least one newspaper. Many counties have 3 or more newspapers and some counties have many papers. New York (Manhattan) has 43 newspapers on the site! Buffalo, where I research a lot, has about 7 papers. Some of the mid-state counties around the finger lakes have large collections. Cayuga county has 39 papers on the site, Onondaga has 39 also. What's great is rural areas are well represented as well as metropolitan areas.
Navigating the Site
The site might scare you when you first arrive—my daughter was sitting next to me while I was preparing this post and she looked the home page of the fultonhistory.com site and said "what's with the scary goldfish!" To put that comment into perspective, she's almost sixteen and is an artist, so she knows what weird is. Just stay with me here.
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| Home Page of fultonhistory.com. Click on the "Enter" button to go to the search area. If you sit and watch this page, you'll hear some narration and the story of the site. |
Now, after clicking on enter you 'll come to this screen:
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| The main search screen of the site. To go to the FAQ Help Index, click on the link at the top right of the screen. |
I would strongly advise that you read, or at least attempt to read the FAQ page, there's some helpful information in it, it gets pretty technical, but it's worth the effort:
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| This is the FAQ Help page. To see a list of the papers, you'll want to click on the link indicated by the red arrow on my screenshot. |
The screenshot below is the Index Page. For a better index, click on the link to download an Excel file that's much easier to use than the index pages are on the site.
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| The index page is difficult to navigate, but the Excel file that you can download (follow the red arrow on the screenshot) is well worth the download. |
The screenshot below is the downloaded Excel file that lists all of the papers and the years they cover as well as the counties they are in. This is a very useful file that you'll probably want to keep handy as you use the site.
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| The downloadable Excel index file is very useful - it list all the papers on the site (pay careful attention to the titles of the papers) and lists the counties they are in also. There's also a map at the bottom of the Excel file that shows the regions the site owner has organized the papers into. |
Find the Newspaper Title You're Interested in Searching in the Excel File
My best success has been to search within the newspaper(s) of the area my ancestors lived to find records about them. You can do a search of the whole site, but if the name of your ancestor was common, you'll probably have so many results you'll tire quickly of scanning through them.
This is where knowing how to search the site becomes critical. Let's look at an example of how to search the site effectively.
Searching the Site Examples
Here's what the search form looks like, it will be on the upper left of your screen:
Let's walk through how to do a search for a couple I was searching for recently; Henry Gansz and Katherine E (Schneider) Gansz who lived in Buffalo, New York. Notice that there's no place to put in a First Name or a Last Name or a place! You can search using four different methods, see the screenshot below:
I have used all four methods, but my most successful way of searching has been using "boolean." Don't let that scare you off, it's not that hard to learn how to use it, and the results can be fantastic.
Boolean search is primarily using the words AND OR and NOT on this site. I use the word AND by far the most.
An example from the family above:
Henry Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider
This search would give me search results that list "Henry Gansz" "Katherine" "Schneider" all on the page of the paper, but not necessarily near each other in the paper. Using these words I didn't find what I was looking for. I quickly figured out that "Henry Ganz" didn't show up under any search results, so I shifted my approach. Here's the next search I tried:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider
With this search I received 30 results, one of which was the obituary I was searching for, but I had to wade through all 30 results to find the information I was looking for, and I got results from Brooklyn, Buffalo, Syracuse, Geneva and a few other places. Since I knew that the family lived in Buffalo, I can get a better result if I search only Buffalo Newspapers. Here's how that search would look:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY))
When I looked at the names of the Buffalo papers, they all are titled "Buffalo NY Courier" "Buffalo NY Courier Express" "Buffalo NY Evening News" etc. The site owner has title papers in this way to make them easier to group together in searches. So when you look in the Excel index you look for the area you're interested in and search for papers. Another example would be newspapers for Rochester, New York. The titles of the papers all start with "Rochester NY" so you would add the AND (Filename contains (Rochester NY)) to the end of your search words to see only results for Rochester, New York newspapers.
Using this last approach, I had only 14 results, all of them from Buffalo papers. Here's the file I was looking for:
By clicking on the blue link, you get a screen that displays a pdf of the page of the paper that matches your search result:
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| This is the search form, notice the pull down menu right under the blank form field at the top of the screenshot. This is a key to using the site effectively. |
Let's walk through how to do a search for a couple I was searching for recently; Henry Gansz and Katherine E (Schneider) Gansz who lived in Buffalo, New York. Notice that there's no place to put in a First Name or a Last Name or a place! You can search using four different methods, see the screenshot below:
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| The four different methods to search the site show when you click on the pull down menu next to the search box. |
I have used all four methods, but my most successful way of searching has been using "boolean." Don't let that scare you off, it's not that hard to learn how to use it, and the results can be fantastic.
Boolean search is primarily using the words AND OR and NOT on this site. I use the word AND by far the most.
An example from the family above:
Henry Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider
This search would give me search results that list "Henry Gansz" "Katherine" "Schneider" all on the page of the paper, but not necessarily near each other in the paper. Using these words I didn't find what I was looking for. I quickly figured out that "Henry Ganz" didn't show up under any search results, so I shifted my approach. Here's the next search I tried:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider
With this search I received 30 results, one of which was the obituary I was searching for, but I had to wade through all 30 results to find the information I was looking for, and I got results from Brooklyn, Buffalo, Syracuse, Geneva and a few other places. Since I knew that the family lived in Buffalo, I can get a better result if I search only Buffalo Newspapers. Here's how that search would look:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY))
When I looked at the names of the Buffalo papers, they all are titled "Buffalo NY Courier" "Buffalo NY Courier Express" "Buffalo NY Evening News" etc. The site owner has title papers in this way to make them easier to group together in searches. So when you look in the Excel index you look for the area you're interested in and search for papers. Another example would be newspapers for Rochester, New York. The titles of the papers all start with "Rochester NY" so you would add the AND (Filename contains (Rochester NY)) to the end of your search words to see only results for Rochester, New York newspapers.
Using this last approach, I had only 14 results, all of them from Buffalo papers. Here's the file I was looking for:
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| Search result using: Ganz AND Katherine AND Schneider AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY)) |
By clicking on the blue link, you get a screen that displays a pdf of the page of the paper that matches your search result:
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| The pdf of the page of the paper displays to the right of the search results. Move your mouse over the bottom right of the screen and you'll see the pdf toolbar to zoom, download or print the file. I always download the pdf's and then search them in Adobe Acrobat since they are text it's the fastest way to find the name you've located on the page. |
Here's what the obituary for Henry Gansz looks like when zoomed in:
As you search papers you'll learn how the paper was organized and techniques to make your searches more effective. For example, when I look in the Buffalo papers I often add the word "Died" to my search when I'm looking for an obituary (which is most of what I look for). For the above search it would look like this:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider AND Died AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY))
One thing I've learned about a lot of the papers I research in is that they uses the term "nee" to refer to the maiden name of women. The term is French in origin, but common in many of the newspapers I have researched in upstate New York. As you will notice in the above obituary, it refers to Katherine E. Gansz as "(nee Schneider)." This is very useful when looking for women who have married when you don't know who they married. In this example if we were looking for Katherine E. Schneider in an obituary for her husband, but didn't know her husband's name, we could search for: Katherine AND nee Schneider AND Died AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY)) if we believe she lived in the area.
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| The obituary for Henry Gansz found on FultonHistory.com. |
As you search papers you'll learn how the paper was organized and techniques to make your searches more effective. For example, when I look in the Buffalo papers I often add the word "Died" to my search when I'm looking for an obituary (which is most of what I look for). For the above search it would look like this:
Gansz AND Katherine AND Schneider AND Died AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY))
One thing I've learned about a lot of the papers I research in is that they uses the term "nee" to refer to the maiden name of women. The term is French in origin, but common in many of the newspapers I have researched in upstate New York. As you will notice in the above obituary, it refers to Katherine E. Gansz as "(nee Schneider)." This is very useful when looking for women who have married when you don't know who they married. In this example if we were looking for Katherine E. Schneider in an obituary for her husband, but didn't know her husband's name, we could search for: Katherine AND nee Schneider AND Died AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY)) if we believe she lived in the area.
Limiting Your Search by Dates
To narrow your search even more, you can put a date range in your search:
Gansz AND Katherine AND nee Schneider AND Died AND (Filename contains (Buffalo NY)) AND 1911~~1913
This search returns only one result, the record we're looking for!
Closing Thoughts
A couple of important things to remember:
- Experiment - try different combinations of words
- Be Patient - it takes a while to get used to the site
- Remember OCR - OCR is for optical character recognition scanning - this is how the papers were scanned and so, letters are often incorrect which means words are often misspelled in the text you're searching. As you noticed in the example above, Henry showed up as "Menry" in the search results!
- THE SEARCH RESULTS ON THE LEFT DON'T ALWAYS DISPLAY WHAT YOU'VE FOUND! I don't know how to explain this, but make sure and read the results carefully. If you don't see the words you searched showing up in the search results on the left, try clicking on the link to the pdf, download it, then search it in Adobe Acrobat by clicking "Ctrl F" and typing in the name you searched. It sounds laborious, and it kind of is, but it can make all the difference in the world.
Happy Hunting!
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