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August 2011 Newsletter

GenealogyBank Adds 22 Million Records in August!

We constantly add more newspapers and obituaries to our online archive. Currently, GenealogyBank features over 5,500 newspapers from all 50 states, with over 160 million obituaries and death records! Here are the details of GenealogyBank's most recent additions, a total of 85 titles from 30 states. We've shown the date ranges so that you can determine if the new content is relevant to your personal research.

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A Brief History of Newspapers in America

Daily newspapers covered the news, reported on events, and recorded the births, marriages and deaths of the people in their community and beyond. Some of the resources available in newspapers are known by most genealogists, such as birth announcements, marriage notices and obituaries, while other newspaper treasures may come as a surprise to you, such as stage coach passenger lists, local briefs, and advertisements. Newspapers are a fantastic resource for researching your family history, and have been published in America since before it became a nation.

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New Search Feature Added to GenealogyBank's Obituaries Collection

We are pleased to announce that we have just added a new search ability ("Search by Title") to our Obituaries collection, a large archive of obituaries from 1977 to the present—with new obituaries added daily. Many people like to begin their family history research by focusing first on obituaries only, to find the dates necessary to fill in their family tree. With the new search ability we have just added, now you can focus your obituaries search on just one specific newspaper, or all the obituaries in just one state, or just one city.

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'Raining Cats and Dogs'—and Sometimes Frogs?

Census and other government records can give us dates and facts about our ancestors, but where do you turn to find their personal stories, an account of something fantastic, exciting or unusual that they experienced? An archive of historical newspapers is the answer. For example, if James Edward Van Voorhes is one of your ancestors, you won't find in his census, marriage or death records an account of a truly bizarre experience he had one rainy day—but you will learn about it in the newspaper, because he wrote the following letter to the editor.

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