Not all newspaper sites are equal

I have been scouring newspaper sites for many years, hoping to find word of my ancestors. To help you search and pick out words and names from the billions of pages the providers use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program to scan the pages looking for your keywords. The problem is not always which program they use, but the condition of the newspaper and the quality of the scan. 

I was frustrated recently looking for a 1990 death notice in the Times Colonist for Vancouver Island. The whole of the issue I needed, and a few others in the same month, were not scanned properly and the bottom third (including the index and the family notice sections) are so blurry they are unreadable. I told support of this, they acknowledged my concerns but I haven't heard anything else yet. I'm hoping it gets fixed before my subscription runs out.

And other times it just well may be the program. For my British ancestors I have used the newspaper section at Find My Past and Newspapers.com. Using filters (place, date, etc) help to narrow the search, but sometimes I still get no results. Then I try British Newspaper Archives, which is free to search. If I get what seems to be a good hit, I make note of the newspaper issue, date and page then browse to that issue and page in another site. 

Newspapers.com may have only one newspaper for Liverpool, as opposed to six at FMP and five at BNA, but after years of searching for an exact date or cause of death for my 2x great grandfather, that's where I found it. 

Remember too that other nearby city papers may print the same news.

You can read about the tragic death of George Singleton here.