I love newspapers and what they add to my research, but it hasn't always been that way. When I first started family history research, I concentrated on vital and census records. I only used newspapers for birth, marriage, and death announcements. That was pretty much the extent of my foray into historical newspapers. One day I was cranking though a microfilm of the Monroe Gazette (that I got through inter-library loan) when I happened on this article.
Of course this isn't on my family...it's my husband's family (I never have this kind of luck in my own research). I'm now a newspaper convert. So much that I have a subscription to GenealogyBank and Newspaper Archive (both have extensive historical newspaper collections) as well as Ancestry. The digitzation and indexing of newspapers isn't perfect. OCR programs can't compensate for light, deteriorated or poor quality news print. But even with this shortcoming it certainly helps to find those obscure articles that we otherwise would miss. Don't be like me...don't overlook the value of newspapers. You never know what you might find.
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