How to search newspaper articles (and more) at BAnQ

 

Many people are finding it daunting to search for newspaper articles at BAnQ. It is not just the language, but also the format. Here I will try to help you navigate the site, as I know in genealogy it is much more rewarding when you can find what you want by yourself. 

To check availability go to the List of Newspapers and click on the area you are looking for and you will get a list of available titles and years. There is no point searching for what is not there. With that in mind, be aware that some articles may have been published in a larger city newspaper. My ancestor had lived most of his life in the Sherbrooke area but his retirement years were spent in the US with his daughter. His obituary was in the Sherbrooke papers. (note: most English Eastern Townships news will be in the Sherbrooke papers)

Getting there

First of all, since most of the site is in French, I recommend searching using the Chrome browser, as you can easily translate into English or any language with just a click. 

In the search bar of your browser type banq numerique to bring up the site. Right click anywhere on the page and choose Translate. If it does not come up as English or the language you want, click on the three dots and choose your language.

In the Search bar where it says All, click on the dropdown menu and choose Quebec Heritage / Reviews and Newspapers. Now you can either type a name in the search box, or just leave it blank, then click on the search symbol.

Searching the website

First search by name. Then to reduce results use the filters on the right of the red bar. Clicking anywhere on the red bar will open or close the filter section. Use Proximity Search to find the two keywords together. Click on Title to choose the newspapers for your area (you can choose more than one). Start to type a title, or use the scroll bar on the right. Click on the Date filter to choose the year, or a range of dates for an obituary or article. Give it a minute to load the whole paper and it will go to the first page the name appears on - which may not be the page you want. Then scroll down, checking for the highlighted words until you find what you are looking for.

A regional paper might not have an obituary column, but it may be written under the town name. Taking Sherbrooke again as an example... the births and deaths column may list only Sherbrooke residents, but I found a nice long obituary under Waterville, the village where they lived. 

Sometimes the newspaper did not digitize well because the print may be too blurred for the OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). Then it is recommended to browse the newspapers you think the article or obituary may have appeared in. 

With no name in the search box, follow the above steps to choose Title and range of Dates. With, or instead of the Title, you can try Place Represented. Once I choose a newspaper, I always go to the front page first to see if there is an index telling me which page the obituaries are on. Some older papers have no index and you have to browse each page.

If you are searching for an accident or other than an obituary, use those keywords in your search.

Once you get used to navigating the site, there is so much more to explore than newspaper articles. Another thing to try is use the top drop down menu to look at notary records, maps and plans or texts. Using texts I searched Ile Reaux and came up with some interesting old documents about where my ancestors lived. Searching a New France surname could bring up affidavits, certificates, guardianships, and trials! 

Use your imagination for keywords and don't limit yourself. 

Note:  If you are a resident of Quebec you can register for a free subscription, which will allow you to save your searches, borrow digital books, and gives you access to all their remote services. There is a charge for non-residents. 

Searching on a mobile

Using a mobile phone is a little different than on the website but you pretty much navigate as above. Clicking on the red bar takes you back and forth to the filters and the results. Again, if you use Chrome you can use the translate to switch to English.

Genealogy gems found in Newspapers

Newspapers can yield much more than birth and marriage announcements and obituaries. Not every newspaper prints the same columns in every issue or every year, but I have found ancestors listed in unexpected ways.

Sometimes you know of an event to do with your ancestor, but you don't know the date it occurred. 

I knew from censuses that one great-great-grandfather was a victualer, but since when? Then I found in the newspaper when he bought and sold his license under License Transfers in Liverpool.

I knew that another great-great-grandfather sold his farm and moved in to town, but I didn't know when. I found it under Property Transfers in the regional newspaper.

My great-great-grandmother traveled from Montreal to Bisbee, AZ when her daughter died and spent a night in a hotel in Tombstone. Look for Hotel Arrivals. 

Under Shipping News or equivalent the newspapers sometimes printed a passenger list...

My great-great-grandfather King's siblings immigrated to Australia. His sister's husband died in Melbourne in 1910 and this was in the newspaper a couple months later... 

Returns of banks in Aberdeen newspapers give ancestor name, address and occupation...

Below is a list of just some of the newspaper columns where you may discover your ancestors. How many can you find? 

Download the list and keep it handy when researching your relatives. 

Relevant Links

List of Common Newspaper Columns

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. 

Look in more than one city newspaper for news

My 2x great grandfatherJohn Seale died in Kingston, Ontario in 3 April 1892. I found a small notice in the Kingston paper, as expected, which gave the date of death, his age and funeral arrangements.

Daily British Whig, 4 Apr 1892, page 1

SEALE- In Pittsburgh, April 3rd, John Seale aged 84 years.The funeral will take place on Wednesday morning at ten o'clock from his late residence, Front Road, to Cataraqui cemetery.  Friends and acquaintances are respectfully invited to attend. 

It's neither here nor there, but he was actually 85.

I decided to take a look at other city papers and found this item in a Toronto newspaper, not under the BMD notices, but under Kingston News.. notes. This one gives us a bit more insight into the character of John. 

Toronto Daily Mail, 5 April 1892, page 4

  
   
My great grand aunt's husband was a locomotive engineer, and when he died in August 1914 his burial record said he died in a railway accident. All I know was that he was living around Chaudiere Station, Quebec City at the time.  So I went to Google Newspaper Archives and went through all the newspapers from around Quebec City that had available issues for that date.  I finally found the story that he died in the Quebec Daily Telegraph, which led me to find the story of the accident in L'Action Sociale.


Sometimes you find a local newspaper for that time, but it is mostly unreadable, like this issue from April 1916 when my grandfather's brother, Alex Mavor, died in WWI.

Montreal Gazette 12 April 1916

Several newspapers published casualty lists and I found Alex's name in the Winnipeg newspaper.  

Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 26 April 1916, pg 2

So if you don't find an article or notice that you're looking for locally, try another city's newspaper. 

Publications of the Armed Forces

The Maple Leaf was a newspaper for the Canadian Armed Forces stationed overseas during WWII. There are not many copies of the first years editions, though some may be found in libraries. Issues from January 1944 to May 1946 are available online.

At the end of the war they printed The Maple Leaf Souvenir Album containing a few of the top stories, photos and articles. I uploaded to my drive some pages that contain names of photos. One of these days I will scan them all in. 

The Maple Leaf

Some of the publications have lists of births, marriages and deaths...

United Service Magazine UK 1847, pg 417

Relevant Links

The Maple Leaf, Canadian Army Newspaper -info

The Maple Leaf on Google Newspaper Archives

The Army and Navy Magazine, UK

The United Service Magazine, UK

The Illustrated First World War

The United service magazine, with which are incorporated the Army and navy magazine and Naval and military journal

The Naval and Military Magazine UK (incl/prize money and personal announcements)

Air Force Magazine, US WWII

The United States Army and Navy journal and gazette 1863-1903

Yank, The Army Weekly

Aussie, The Australian Soldier’s Magazine

Army News, Australia

The Recuperator : official magazine 1st Australian Convalescent Depot WWII

The East India United Service Journal and Military Magazine 1838

VRI Magazine     

Press Associations and Journalists

We all know that newspapers can be a great source for stories about our ancestors.
What about the owners of the newspapers?  The editors and journalists? Do you have an ancestor that worked at a newspaper?

The objectives of the press associations were to promote the general interests of the journalistic profession and to improve the quality of journalism. Members were journalists from different respected newspapers across the country, province or state. 

The booklets of meetings of the associations have lists of members. 

Virginia Press Association 1898

Some of the following publications have portraits also. 

Check local libraries for more. 

Relevant Links

A History of the National Amateur Press Association, 1900

Michigan Woman's Press Association, 1889

Michigan Woman's Press Association, 1891

Michigan Woman's Press Association, 1893

Michigan Press Association

New Hampshire Press Association

Annual Meeting of the Illinois Press Association, 1907

Arkansas Press Association

History of the Texas Press Association

A history of Canadian journalism in the several portions of the Dominon, with a sketch of the Canadian Press Association 1859-1908

Virginia Press Association

Winter Meeting of the Missouri Press Association

American Journalists in Europe, 1919

Australian Journalists in London, 1918

Leading Lady Journalists, 1896

Canadian Division of the Institute of Journalists, 1911

Queensland's pioneer journals and journalists,1945

Canada 150 - Newfoundland Quarterly

During our country's 150th anniversary celebration of confederation I will write posts titled Canada 150 with a link to a publication or website I find that may help you tell the story of your Canadian ancestors.
Click on the Canada 150 label on the right or at the bottom to see all the posts.

Today I have for you...

The Newfoundland Quarterly

The Newfoundland Quarterly was founded in 1901 focusing on the arts, culture, history and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is still published today, making it the second oldest magazine in Canada. Searchable and can download.



Relevant Links

The Newfoundland Quarterly, archives online courtesy of Memorial University

The Newfoundland Quarterly

WWI Casualty Lists in Newspapers

I had noticed that many newspapers printed casualty lists throughout WWI. My grandfather's brother was killed in April 1916 so I did a search of the Montreal Gazette, but looking at the papers for that time parts of the images are whited out, so if they did indeed print a list it's not showing. Nothing in any Montreal papers. So I forgot about it for a while.

The other day I was doing a broad search of the Mavor name at Newspapers.com, and guess what!?! I found mention of my great uncle on the Canadian Casualties list in the Winnipeg Tribune, 26 April 1916, page 2... 

... AND I also found mention of my grandfather on the Canadian Casualties list in the Vancouver Daily World of 31 July 1916, page 3.   

One of the features I like at Newspapers.com is they have a "Save to Ancestry" button on their menu bar, saves right to the person's profile, under other sources...

When searching for mention of your WWI ancestor in newspapers, broaden your search to other cities. 

Finding an Obituary... with Tenacity

In many FaceBook Groups I see people asking for help in locating an obituary. Finding an obituary for an ancestor that died many years ago is not always that easy.  Some reasons being... not everyone placed a notice in the paper, some poverty-stricken persons' deaths went unnoticed, or simply the edition of the paper it may have been published in was not digitized or it may no longer exist.
 
Many obituaries are not found by simply doing a search of the person's name in a newspaper archive search box. It is not a live person that went through each newspaper and diligently indexed each person's name they found.  Most digitalized newspapers are scanned with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and especially with older papers where the print is hard to read you may get gobbledygook, like this:

If I have one trait that serves me well searching for my ancestors, it is tenacity! I have found quite a few of my ancestors' notice of death by browsing.  With most newspaper sites you can narrow down the search by dates, then browse through them looking for the Births and Deaths column.  Some of the newer papers have the page listed in the index near the front of the paper. Most older ones don't.  But once you get used to a paper you can see it is mostly in the same place in all issues. So if you know (or suspect) an approximate date it is not too tedious a job.  When I found one notice looking for creditors of a "late" ancestor, I knew his death date was not far before.

One ancestor immigrated from Devon, England and died in Montreal on December 20, 1875. So I turned to google newspaper archives to find his obituary. I had found quite a few ancestors in Montreal and area newspapers. So I started with a general name search... that was a no-go. I clicked on the M to go browse the Montreal Gazette. Oh oh, one problem... there was no Montreal Gazette for 1875. So one by one I checked all the newspapers from Montreal that had issues digitized for around that date.

You can see by the dark "visited" link that I tried quite a few newspapers looking for my ancestor, and that is only the ones with the word Montreal in the title. These are the papers that supposedly covered 1875, although I found that not all papers had any issues for either the month, or they skipped the year 1875 completely.

Looking at the Montreal Daily Witness, I checked around dates that are close. Finally for Wednesday December 22, 1875 I found it! 

Dec 22, 1875 pg 4

Notice right after the obit is says "Halifax NS and Charlottetown PEI papers please copy". I have seen this after a few obituaries and I wonder if it means they had relatives there? Hmmmm something to look into!

I found many of my ancestors the same way at British Newspaper Archives, at FindMyPast and some US newspaper sites.

Do you have tenacity?

** As a side comment for those of you searching in Montreal, The Montreal Daily Witness, a religious and literary paper, has what they title a "Colonne Francaise" with news from the French community. It is also available at BANQ Newspaper Collection.

In Honour of the Best Mother who Ever Lived!

Northern Pacific Railway Mother's Day postcard - 1915 - white carnations are the symbol of pure love

When I was young there was an elderly couple that lived near us and they sold flowers and plants. On the Saturday before Mother's Day all the kids in the neighbourhood went to their house to get potted flowers for Mom.

My Mom loves Chinese Food, and one of the first places where I worked I was teamed up with a guy from China. His sister gave me some instructions and bought some ingredients for me in Chinatown, and I spent hours (most of it chopping) to make a delicious Chinese dinner for my Mom. Sweet and Sour Ribs, Rice, Chop Suey and Egg Rolls. Mmmmmm. Since the only other entree I had made at home was spaghetti, my Mom was very pleased and impressed!

When I had my own kids, although it was becoming vogue to buy gifts, I steered my girls more toward  doing something nice for me, plus whatever they made for me at school. When they all got old enough, they banded together each year and washed my car.  After a long dirty winter it sure needed it, and the girls had a great time with the hose and buckets of soapy water.  I don't know which was wetter, the kids or the car! The joy for me was merely watching them working and having fun together.

1908 - wear a  white carnation to honour your mother.   "People with bad mothers are also invited to wear the carnation on Mother's Day in honour of someone else's mother who was good." 

1909 - over 50,000 people wearing the white carnation as an expression of filial love.

1913 - Mother's Day is spreading - an appeal to men to honour their mothers ...

 More recent newspapers from the 60's on carried Mother's Day messages like these ones...

 What traditions do you have, and how do you honour your Mother?





Serendipity Sunday - Social Media

FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube ... the go to sites to let people know what you are doing, where you are going, who is going with or broke up with whom...

Years past people did the same thing using their social media, the Social or Society Pages of the local newspapers.

Here are examples of what a town society writer would put in the paper.

 

  

                                                                         

 Just like today, they aired the good, the bad and the ugly. A scandal was juicy news.

 



 

 

 

 

London 1906

Look for the Social, Society or Around Town News section of the local newspapers for mention of your ancestors.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

While researching my Tait family I came across a reference to an announcement of one of the daughters' wedding in the newspaper for Bath, Somerset. I only have the one family that was in Bath for one generation from Scotland then immigrated to Canada, so I don't have a subscription for that set of British Newspapers. I asked in a group and a kind person offered to look it up for me and she found that article and two others.  These are the two stories:

On the 24th of April, a beautiful spring day in 1901, Alice Tait and her brother Andrew went boating on the Avon River with some friends, starting in the morning at Maynard’s Boating Station and going upriver past Bathampton to Warleigh. They spent the day there and headed back to the Boating Station around 6:40 in the evening. Alice was in a boat with Mr Roberts, and Mr and Mrs Pope who got off the boat at Bathampton and walked home. They waited for the other boat holding Mary Davidson and her sister, Mr Cottle and Andrew Tait. They passed under the bridge and Andrew’s boat got too close to the weirs and tipped over, the misses Davidson screaming for help. Mr Robert jumped out of his boat to help the girls, and Alice also got out of her boat and ran for help, then returned and jumped back in the river to help her brother Andrew, who was having trouble against the unusually strong currents. Mr Robert couldn't save Miss Mary Davidson and she drowned in the water. There was a coroner’s inquest the next day at which Alice had to testify. Andrew was seriously ill for a while but slowly recovered.

A few days later their father Andrew Smith Tait had a stroke and died.



Besides birth, wedding and death announcements, also look for bankruptcies, gossip columns (Mrs Jane Smith is getting a visit from her niece Miss Eliza Jones from England), probate announcements (to notify creditors), ship arrival and departure notices, unclaimed mail, society meetings, estate auctions, etc.  

You may find some archives of local newspapers in city libraries, universities or historical societies. Below are some links to newspaper archives, and some collections may overlap but better to have more than to miss some.

 
Relevant Links:


Google News - varied collection - 2-2000 issues

Wikipedia List of Online Newspapers

Family Search list of Digital Historical Newspapers

Australia Newspapers

Ireland Dublin Library

Word on the Street - UK Broadsides

Crime Broadsides (Harvard)

New York Times May 1915, Oct 1915, July 1919

Extracts from old Newspapers - USA

British Newspaper Archives (free to search $)

Greenfield (Mass) Gazette Centennial Edition 1892

Helen Keller Newspaper Notices

Chronicling America LOC Newspapers

Newspaper Collection Wisconsin University

New Hampshire Newspapers

Netherlands Newspapers

The London Gazette

Some Canada Newspapers

Canadian Newspaper Databases & Indexes 

Newspaper Links on Active History

Newspaper info at LAC

Nova Scotia Newspapers Online

Republican Advocate, Batavia NY

Ontario Newspapers 

Manitoba Newspapers

Saskatchewan Newspapers

The Gazette - UK and Ireland

Quebec Newspapers at BANQ

Church of Ireland Gazette - 1913-15

McKim's directory of Canadian publications