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I searched a 100 year old newspaper for a family name and got a horse ad instead
Last month I was in the basement of the Cleveland public library trying to find my great grandpa's name in old papers. I typed his name into a news database but got zero hits, so I tried just his last name plus the year 1919. The only result was an ad for a plow horse that said "good teeth, no vices, $45." Turns out the paper's search tool only read the OCR wrong on every single page. Anyone know a trick for searching old newspapers when the text is all messed up?
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matthewg637d ago
Been there with the OCR mess. I spent like three hours searching for my grandma's maiden name in some Ohio paper from 1912 and kept getting hits for saddle soap and corset ads. The old news sites scan the pages at such low quality that letters like S and F get swapped all the time. One thing that helped me was searching with wildcards or just the first few letters of the name, plus trying the paper's own site instead of the big database. Also sometimes it helps to put the name in quotes with a year range, since the search engine will pick up close matches even if a letter or two is wrong.
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