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It’s Personal: Tracing Your Ancestors in Local Newspapers

October 24, 2020 @ 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

The Friends of the Cos Cob Library and the Local History Department of the Greenwich Library are pleased to co-sponsor and welcome back Genealogy teacher Janeen Bjork, who will present a free program at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 24th, entitled “It’s Personal: Tracing Your Ancestors in Local Newspapers.”

About the Program: The items in Personal and Social columns of newspapers are more than just gossip, they are insights into your ancestors’ FAN (Friends, Associates and Neighbors) Club, and into the values of the community, they lived in. Newspapers encouraged their readers to visit their offices and to call their editors with their “personal” news. Join us for an entertaining look at what you might find, if you know how to look. For example, you will learn that a local editor may not have called your family member by their full name. Auditor Baker in Des Moines and Landlord Reedy in Chatham, NY did not need first names. They lived where everybody knew their name.

About the Speaker: TV researcher and Genealogy teacher Janeen Bjork has been obsessed with the information historical newspapers contain ever since she found a story about the 1894 murder of her great-great-grandfather, William Strutz, in a Syracuse, NY newspaper. At last count, she had found over 135 different accounts of the tragedy, despite the murderer’s or the victim’s names being misspelled or misread by OCR (optical character recognition, the technology that allows newspapers to be indexed and searched online) in the majority of the newspapers. She will share her search methodology and examples that illustrate how anyone (you!) can find and preserve family items from online newspapers.

Venue

Zoom

Organizer

Greenwich Library
Phone:
203-622-7918
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