Fifty-six years ago last month, a daughter was reunited with her father who she hadn’t seen for 43 years – not since she was less than 5 years old. That daughter was my mother, nee Virginia Cornett Feller. I was reminded of the reunion while searching for Meitzlers at Newspapers.com last evening.
The event is a bit hazy in my mind as I was only (almost) 7 at the time. However, I remember my mother leaving for a trip and being gone for a while. During the period mom was gone, I went to stay with my 1st-grade school teacher, Mrs. Aufderhaur, who, with her husband, lived in housing at Auburn Academy in Auburn, Washington. My mother’s meeting her father was a big deal for our family, and Neal Cornett (see photo below) became an integral part of our lives for the next 20 years. I thought it was cool to have a grandfather, something I’d never known before. I guess the press thought it was a big deal too, as the AP picked up the story and the news is found in various newspapers published around the country.
The article that caught my eye last night was published in the 26 March 1957 edition of the Greely Daily Tribune. What brought it to my attention again was that I just happened to buy an annual subscription to Newspapers.com while at RootsTech a few days ago. As a long-time Footnote.com subscriber, I was given a small discount on my Newspapers.com subscription. I’ve been very busy, and this was my first opportunity to search for relatives.
Newspapers.com allows for simple and advanced searches. I can search for a name, or by doing an advanced search, I can search for a specific place, and even limit the dates searched. I found that after doing my search, if I check the left-hand column I see a map showing where the name is found (by state), and below that, the number of entries found per state. I can see the hits for any of those states by clicking on their link. The results page shows a small teaser clipping of each hit, along with the name and place where the newspaper was published, as well as the day and date of the paper. Finally – the number of hits in that paper is listed.
Searches on Newspapers.com are free, and the results teaser often give the searcher enough information to know if that “hit” might be one that will expand their family history. Click on any of the links in this article to do a free search, and see for yourself how the info in the above paragraph might apply to your own family history.
On a personal level, a couple of the things that are nice about Newspapers.com is the “Clipping aspect of the program, allowing the user to “clip” the relevent portion of the paper and save it to a personal “Clipping” portion of the site. I can also save a clipping to Pinterest, which I’m just getting started with. My plan is to set up a Pinterest board for each of my family’s immigrants and their descendents. But that’s another topic!
Another thing that I did while at RootsTech was to establish an affiliate relationship with Newspapers.com, so if people click on my links to the site, and then happen to subscribe, I will receive a portion of the subscription fee. That’s the way affiliate relationships work. While not bringing in a lot of money, they do help to defray the expenses of producing GenealogyBlog.com.
Now… with that said, I’m going back to searching… I’ve found all kinds of things I’ve not seen before about my family, and I know there’s a lot more to come, for according to the website, there are currently over 38 million pages from over 1100 US newspapers, all dated from the 1700s–2000s to search.
