Elephind: A Digital Newspaper Collections Search Engine

Elephind is a great service that searches online digital newspaper collections. Best of all, it is available free of charge.

On a personal note, I was a bit skeptical at first, as most of my relatives are definitely not famous or newsworthy, but on researching one ancestor who was a merchant marine captain there were ten or more pages of articles, mostly shipping news, but well worth going through.

Elephind.com is a search engine that operates much like Google, Bing, or other search engines. The one thing that is different with Elephind is that it searches only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search, for free, across many newspaper sites simultaneously, rather than having to visit each collection’s web site separately.

At this time, Elephind has indexed 2,779 newspaper titles containing more than two and a half million editions, ranging from March 1803 up to January 1, 2015 in some titles. The Elephind search engine has indexed 149,363,907 items from 2,779 newspaper titles. These include such well known sites as the Chronicling America (the U.S.’s Library of Congress) and Trove (National Library of Australia), as well as smaller collections like Door County Library in Wisconsin. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com.

For more information on using Elephind, please click here.

Give it a try, you may be surprised and pleased at what you find.

Source: Dick Eastman, the Daily On Line Genealogy Newsletter

Thousands of photos on interactive map of “Lost London”

An interactive map of “Lost London” that gives a ‘unique and rare’ insight to the capital has been created online by the London Metropolitan Archives.

Over 100,000 images and 130 shorts films have been digitised for the project, including footage of Victorians shelling peas in Covent Garden Market and images of the construction of Tower Bridge.

Using Google Maps, the photos and videos from ‘Victorian life in the raw’ are mapped out across approximately 11,000 streets of ‘lost London’.

Free to access, the site allows visitors to search by a particular street to see how it looked hundreds of years ago, and to print their own versions of the images.

Laurence Ward, from the London Metropolitan Archives, told London Live: “It basically takes you back in terms of place – it could be the place you live, work in, places that you go to – you can see what they looked like 100 or 200 years ago.

“These wonderful, historical images give you a chance to step back and look at how things have changed around you.

“It gives you a map of lost London, if you like, because a lot of things are images [of] things that don’t exist anymore.

Laurence Ward, from the London Metropolitan Archives, told London Live:

“They just take you back to a totally different world – it’s Victorian life in the raw.

“We’re publishing those for the first time on the site – we’re also publishing lots of film clips in London.

“The photographs, in particular, are really important because at the end of the 19^th century, they show you all these things like massive engineering projects – like the construction of Tower Bridge.

“These photographs are quite unique and [give] a rare view of how these things were built – you can see photographs of people with big sledge hammers and it’s quite a surprising view of the London we know very well coming into being.”

You can start your search here. To maximize your search, read the brief information about Using the London Picture Map under the main map.

If you don’t find what you are looking for on the map, try the Advanced Search. The Search Tips are also useful.

Source: Gail Dever, Genealogy a la carte

DNA – the Results – What’s Next

DNA is really taking off as one of the most popular ways to try to break down seemingly impossible brick walls. But does it help? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It all depends on others who are related to you and trying to trace their ancestors. But don’t give up, in the future you just may find that elusive ancestor through a DNA connection.

The question that we all have is how to use or understand the results of your DNA test. The July 9th article from Lost Cousins , “DNA Special” may just be what you need to answer some of your questions.

Happy Hunting!