United States Finding and Interpreting Newspapers (National Institute)

Understanding What You Are Reading
As you are reading the newspaper, you may begin to wonder if you are reading a foreign language. Usually though, the vernacular or abbreviations that you are reading are the result of the newspaper world, or the general colloquialism of the time. You may want to have a dictionary handy, to help you in defining certain phrases or words if the newspapers are heavy with the language of the age.

Abbreviations
Abbreviations may be a little more prevalent than you anticipated as a result of the limited typeface of the publisher. Some of these abbreviations may have been encountered in other records including census, vital, land, or probate.

Some of the abbreviations were used when there was limited space, perhaps where the vital records announcements might have been included, for instance. Two that you may come across are “inst.” and “ultimo.”

“Inst” is the abbreviation for instant and means that the event took place in that month. So if the newspaper was dated June 15, 1813 and the entry mentioned the couple had been married on the “2nd inst.” then you know that they were married on June 2, 1813.

“Ultimo” is Latin and refers to the past month. If you read in a newspaper dated July 15, 1860 that the event took place “on the 14th ultimo” then you would know that it did not take place in July but instead on June 14th.

A more common abbreviation that you have seen frequently when working in other records would be the abbreviation of names. You are likely to find this in newspapers as well. While some of them will be simple enough to decipher, such as “Wm.” for William, but there may be other times when there is possibly more than one possibility. Finally, you will find many titles have been abbreviated, such as Capt. or the many other military titles. Another popular one would be “Esq.” which actually comes at the end of the name, and is the abbreviation for Esquire.

Date Conventions
In addition to those dates that may be abbreviated as described above, there may be other date conventions that you could find in the newspaper. One of the more prevalent ones is the use of the word last. You will often see the entry in the page with the date listed as “Thursday last.”

For instance, in The Connecticut Journal, dated October 23, 1767, I found an entry that read: Thursday last Mrs. Whittelsay (widow of Late Rev. Whittelsey) died in an advanced age at Wallingford. In viewing a calendar for October, 1767, I discovered that October 23 was a Friday, so it is likely that Mrs. Whittlesey died on Thursday, October 22, 1767.

Graphic with Miscellaneous Date Gettysburg Compiler, March 21, 1821, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Very often the entries won’t even have an actual date. All too often, genealogists come across newspaper entries for births, marriages, deaths, or burials that have no date, just refer to the event having taken place “recently.”

Such a lack of a date can be frustrating, but if you do find such an entry, you may be able to use other sources to get the exact date, such as church, burial, or probate records.

Miscellaneous Other Terms
Remember that as you are working in older newspapers that the terms are not always the same in meaning as they are now. For instance, a lot of medical terms and slang have changed over the years. As such, you may find that reading through certain news stories may take a little more time than reading a news story in today’s papers.

Sometimes a book like Marc McCutcheon’s Everyday Life in the 1800s: A Guide for Writers, Students, and Historians (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001) may be wise investment. While it doesn’t specifically mention genealogists, you will find that the chapter on slang, with accompanying glossary is a good place to start when confronted with the vernacular of old.

The Name’s the Same—Or Is It?
Newspapers have come and gone through the centuries. Sometimes though, it isn’t that the newspaper is gone, but that it has changed names. For instance, The Hartford Courant was originally The Connecticut Courant.

You may have been told to look for a certain paper only to discover that it appears that newspaper is no longer being published. One way to determine if that newspaper is still in existence or has a history is to check the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, the professional’s reference of current print media published in the U.S. and Canada and radio, television, and cable companies, published by the Gale Group in Detroit, Michigan. In the past it was known as the Ayer Directory of Publications which has been continuously published since 1869.

You may be able to find some of the older editions of the Ayer directory at libraries. The Family History Library, in Salt Lake City, Utah, has some of them, though unfortunately they have not been microfilmed. You may also find them at university libraries.

In addition to the Gale Directory, there are number of other avenues to help you in finding out not only about a specific newspaper, if you know the title, but also find out what newspapers may have been in existence in a given town or city for a particular period of time.

Newspaper Bibliographies
Newspaper bibliographies are designed to supply you with the needed information for locating the newspapers of interest to you. Most of the time, the bibliographies rely on certain abbreviations to save space. Before using any of kind of bibliography or other research aid, it is always a good idea to read the introductory material so that you know


 * what abbreviations have been used,
 * the scope of the project in regard to the records,
 * the scope of the project in regard to region or other locality,
 * the scope of the project in regard to years covered, and
 * the scope of the project in regard to medium (books or microform)

Some newspaper bibliographies will include separate entries for the original paper versions and the microform versions of the newspapers, so you want to make sure to look at the entire page or elsewhere in the book to see if the compiler has separated the original paper versions completely from the microform versions. Other bibliographies list everything for the newspaper under the one heading.

There are many ways that bibliographies differ one from another. In addition to the scope of the project, as mentioned above, it is also important to understand if the bibliography is more a directory of currently in print newspapers, such as the Gale Directory, or if it is more a true bibliography identifying the newspapers in every format and telling you were you can find them.

Understanding What They Tell You
The purpose of the bibliography is to tell you what you need to know about the newspaper so that you know if that particular holding will be of use to you in your research. As such there are certain things that the entry should include:


 * title of the newspaper


 * volume numbering (watch out here, because some newspapers didn’t have actual volume numbers)


 * dates included in the collection or dates of publication for the newspaper


 * publication details (includes the name and place of publication, dates of publication)


 * frequency of publication


 * subtitle, declaration of philosophy, or area of interest (usually stated in the masthead) ³ name of the editor (The editor is different from the publisher. The publisher is the individual in charge, while the editor is decides what will be included in the paper and the overall look to the paper.)


 * note of other names the newspaper was published under


 * year of holdings for the given library or archive


 * library or archive codes (The library codes are usually found at the front of the volume, and may be separate from other abbreviations.)

If the archive or library has the newspaper in microform—microfilm or microfiche—then you may find additional information in the entry as to what type of microform the archive has. In some instances different years may be found in different formats.

There are two bibliographies that I tend to turn to when investing the availability of any given American newspaper from 1690 to 1936. With the information in the two of them, I find I get a wealth of information about the specific newspaper and where I may find repositories with that newspaper. The first is Clarence S. Brigham’s History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975). One of the things I like about this particular bibliography is that there are no abbreviations requiring a key. Even the abbreviations for the various repositories that have editions of the newspaper discussed are easy to identify.

Brigham – Boston-Evening Post



In the sample included here for the Boston Evening-Post, we are told that it was a weekly publication and that it was established on August 18, 1735. What is interesting is to discover that in fact it appears that Thomas Fleet used the Boston Evening-Post as a continuation of his The Weekly Rehearsal. In turning to the entry for the Weekly Rehearsal not only do I find the history of this newspaper and the repositories that have issues, but I also find another source cited. Few bibliographies or union lists of newspapers supply that kind of information, but you will want to keep a look out for it and truly read each bibliographic entry to make sure you have the whole picture about the newspaper of interest.

The second resource I use is Winifred Gregory’s American Newspapers 1821-1936, A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada (Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1967). This is a more traditional bibliography with abbreviations and symbols. There are two keys, the first is a general set of abbreviations and symbols that includes the months, the frequency of publication, and miscellaneous other symbols to inform the researcher of what is known and what is not known, or if an entry is incomplete. The next set of symbols is broken down by state and identifies the many different repositories canvassed in the compilation of this bibliography.

Extract from Winifred Gregory’s American Newspapers 1821-1936



Regardless of which bibliography you find yourself using, don’t forget to spend some time reading the introductory material. This may tell you what newspapers and other periodicals have been included, or how to tell if entries have been removed. The introductory material is also where you are most apt to find the explanations of abbreviations or symbols used in the entries.

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