Ancestry Academy  > Education  >  How to Use Newspapers.com Hints in Your Ancestry Family Tree

 

In this virtual event, Ancestry’s Corporate Genealogist Crista Cowan explores how to effectively utilize Newspapers.com hints within an Ancestry family tree. The primary objective of the session is to teach researchers not only how the two platforms integrate, but also how to properly evaluate these hints to uncover the rich, narrative stories of their ancestors. Emphasizing that records are just raw material, Crista highlights how historical newspapers can provide unparalleled context, revealing details like exact immigration origins, unrecorded birth dates, and community involvement that traditional government records often miss.

 

This event is structured as a practical, hands-on tutorial, beginning with diverse examples of newspaper discoveries—from 19th-century society pages to out-of-state obituaries. Crista provides a technical overview of how Ancestry leverages advanced AI technology to segment and index billions of newspaper pages into highly searchable databases, such as the Stories and Events index. The presentation culminates in a critical lesson on evaluating hints—reminding viewers that a hint is a maybe, not a match—by rigorously verifying names, dates, places, and addresses before attaching them to a profile. Finally, Crista demonstrates the correct methods for clipping and saving articles to a family tree to maintain licensing agreements and proper source citations.

 

Chapters:

- The Hidden Gold in Newspapers

- Navigating Newspapers.com Access

- How AI Indexes Newspapers

- Evaluating Newspaper Hints

- Clipping and Saving Best Practices

 

Review your Ancestry hints today and start clipping historical newspaper articles to transform raw genealogical data into a compelling family story.