30 November 2012

Those hyphens can cause trouble

I've been playing with the newspapers at Genealogybank.com, looking for various references to early family members and hoping to flesh out a few details. My most recent discovery reminded me of a limitation of digital versions of newspapers. 

Date: Monday, May 3, 1819  


Paper: Concord Observer (Concord, NH) --obtained on  

  Genealogybank.com

This is a death notice of Samuel Sargent that appeared in a newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, shortly after his death in 1819. There are times when I use the town of residence as a search term when searching on   Genealogybank.com. 

This time there's a slight problem with using Marlborough as a search term. Actually, there are two considerations. In some instances the word could be spelled without the final "h."

In this case using the town as a search term did not locate the image shown above because the town name is hyphenated.

Just something to keep in mind when creating and using search terms at any site that has digital images of newspapers or other items such as   Genealogybank.com.