Family Tree
Grow Your
Your Genealogy Problems Solved
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Have a genealogy question for Chris?
Email [email protected] with
‘Grow Your Family Tree’ in the subject line.25 May – 7 June 2022 • Issue 632 Next issue: Search the 1950 US CensusI researched my family 11 years ago using
Family Tree Maker 11 (FTM) and Ancestry.
I’ve learned that Ancestry isn’t going to
upgrade FTM anymore. I’ve now exported
my tree as a GEDCOM file. Which service
should I use now?
Tom OrchardAncestry hasn’t actually run FTM since
2016, when it sold the program to UScompany Software MacKiev (see http://www.
snipca.com/41826). The current version,
FTM 2019, still lets you synchronise your
tree on your computer with the one
hosted on Ancestry. Another program that
syncs with Ancestry is RootsMagic 8
(www.rootsmagic.com).Copy the OCR preview text on the BNA site,
then paste it as a search on FindmypastFindmypast
offers several
ways to narrow
your searchYou can narrow the search by date, place,
county, newspaper and article type^3.Find OCR text in the BNA
Despite these filtering options,
Findmypast can return more results than
you bargained for. The BNA’s search tools
are far superior, letting you target specific
years, months, countries and titles. Basic
searches on the BNA are free, so we
advise starting your search there, then
viewing final pages on Findmypast.
In this example, I will look for an
obituary for my grandfather’s missionary
cousin, the Reverend William Paton, who
died in August 1943. I searched for
“william paton” +missionary +obituary
(^1 in our screenshot below right) on the
BNA site, returning hundreds of articlesN
ewspapers are useful for
researching family history because
they provide an alternative to
official sources for information on
births, marriages and deaths. The best
place to look through them is in the
British Newspaper Archive (www.
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, BNA),
which is a partnership project between
Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk) and
the British Library (www.bl.uk).
It has now digitised over 50 million
pages from newspapers, 10 million more
than its original aim when it launched
in 2011. The site requires a subscription
to access most of its content, but as a
project partner, Findmypast provides
access to the same material through a Pro
subscription (£14.99 a month), saving
members the need for two subscriptions.Use Findmypast’s
search filters
Click ‘Search’ on Findmypast’s top menu,
then select ‘Newspapers and Periodicals’.
On the next screen, search by first and
last name at the top left, adding further
terms in the ‘What Else?’ box (^1 in our
screenshot above right). Unlike on the
BNA site, British and Irish newspapers
cannot be searched together, so you need
to select one or the other on the left^2.from 1800-1999. Using the filters on
the left, I narrowed the search to 1943,
bringing me two obituaries: one from the
Belfast News-Letter 2 , the other from the
Birmingham Daily Post 3.
Below each result is a small amount of
preview text^4 generated by Optical
Character Recognition (OCR). Some of
this text may be gibberish, depending on
the quality of the image. As both sites
have the same images, and the same
OCR text, I can use this preview text
in a search to locate the exact same
image on Findmypast.
To do so, I simply copy the text found
below the entry I need, then paste this
into the ‘What Else?’ search box at
Findmypast. The desired page will appear
in the preview screen below. Click it to
view it, and save it to your computer if
necessary.Find your ancestors in old newspapers
When it comes to births, marriages and deaths, searching
two sites is better than one. Chris Paton explains how to...
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