Tip: German-Language Newspaper Search
- Pamela Israel
- Oct 3, 2018
- 1 min read
Here’s a fun tip for researching relatives, especially 1st generation German ones. The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers has a wealth of wonderful information and good search capabilities. Many papers' scans have not made it into the library, but it's worth a shot to look.
If the paper had a good scan, the site can even do searches of papers written in Fraktur, the Gothic-style common in older German publications.
The automated scans of old German newspapers (and lots of old German books) in Fraktur often have mistakes in individual letters, most commonly confusing s and f (so if you don’t find, says your Susanne Pfeiffer, you might look for ‘Sufanne Pseisser’ or the like). Computers sometimes confuse e and c, u and n, or nn with m, or rn with m as well.
I recently looked up my great-grandfather, Alois Harschnek, who immigrated from Silesia to work on the 1896 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. I found him in a 1920 issue of “Vorbote” (translates to “Harbinger”) a Chicago German-language semi-anarchist paper. He apparently gave double what anyone else did, and 4 times as much as most people. We’d recently found that he was quite left-leaning through some newly-published letters from him to Joseph Peukert.
Stay tuned for more tales of Alois!
I read the post about tips for searching German newspapers and it made me think about how digging into old sources can really open up a whole world of history and context. When I was stressed before a big test last year I once used online TEAS exam assistance to help me organize review topics and calm my nerves, and that helped me break things into manageable pieces. That taught me to plan ahead and stay steady when work feels heavy.