I recommended the library purchase this excellent reference piece. The more research tools a genealogist has access to, the more likely discoveries will occur. I appreciated the additional research logs and worksheets James Beidler included, as well as the tutorials and sourcing hints. This book is comprehensive and high value.

Great reference for amateur genealogists. Not a book that you can necessarily read from cover to cover. It provides key tips on getting the most from newspaper articles in the context of family history.

I loved this book. As a mediocre genealogist, I am always looking for ways to improve upon my searches. Beidler's book is a big help! It is full of resources and methods to search old newspapers, and I am now armed to further my investigations. Plus, it has handy worksheets to use to help. Maybe now I can fill in some of the "missing links" in my tree, and flesh out some of the lives of my ancestors.

I love to find information on my family members and wanted a book that could give me some ideas for more places to search. This is the perfect book. I never knew how many historical newspaper resources there are and how to go about searching them. This book that is full of so much good information is priceless. Anyone into genealogy, this is a book that will help you find information.

Well-known genealogist James M. Beidler discusses newspapers as a genealogical source. He covers most types of newspapers. Religious newspapers were omitted from separate treatment although a few titles showed up in a geographic sample in the book. He does an excellent job relating available databases, even acknowledging ethical questions about business practices of some. Beidler, best known for his German genealogical research, includes international newspapers, not limiting the discussion to the United States. The book's greatest flaw lies in the format of the otherwise excellent bibliography. It does not employ a recognized style manual such as Evidence Explained or Chicago Manual of Style. Since one chapter included information on citing newspapers following the recognized genealogical citation manual Evidence Explained, this surprised me. Beidler's work will become the most-cited "how to" guide on newspaper research in the genealogical community in the near future. All genealogy libraries with methodology collections should purchase a copy. I received an electronic advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Newspapers are among my favorite sources for genealogical information. I just love finding articles about my ancestors or even about complete strangers. You learn so much about what life was like from kinds of things made the news and from the ads and the entertainment listings and the police blotters and the social news and the classifieds and on and on. Having spent a lot of time tracking down and looking at newspapers, I wondered how much I would really learn from a book about the subject.

The book is full of resources and information. There are chapters on how to find newspapers and what to look for (not just obituaries!). There's info on how OCD (optical character recognition) works and doesn't work and how to tailor your searches to find the hits a typical search might miss. James Beidler goes into the history of newspapers and what types of information you might look for and find. He breaks down the largest providers of online newspaper archives, which are free and paid, the strengths and weaknesses.

All of this is well worth the price of the book already, but Beidler also includes some links to very useful worksheets and research logs so you can stay organized while doing newspaper searches. On top of that, he includes a really excellent appendix of online newspaper archive sites. There's also a massive bibliography of further resources organized by country and state.

I learned so much from this book and couldn't wait to try out some of the sites that were new to me, and use the tips on Boolean operators (NEAR and ADJ were new to me). Five Stars!

(Thanks to NetGalley and F + W Media for a digital review copy.)

I track my family tree on Ancestry and books like this always interest me. This one focuses on finding information about your ancestors through newspapers. Surprisingly there were a lot more pages and information than I was expecting.

The chapters are:

* The historical role of newspapers
* Records in newspapers
* Vital records and life events in newspapers
* Obituaries and other death notices
* Understanding newspaper media
* Free newspaper websites
* Newspapers.com
* Genealogybank
* Other subscription websites
* Seeking out other newspapers
* Ethnic-focused newspapers
* International newspapers
* Preserving, collecting and citing newspapers
* Putting it all together

Throughout the book there are photo examples of articles, obituaries, notices (birth, marriage announcements, death and divorces), etc. from various newspapers from different times. There are also worksheets you can use to record your information along with many links which take you to the sources described.

Though it's geared towards American sources (I'm in Canada), my father's family and my maternal grandmother's family were from the States so I'll probably find these sources helpful.

This book helps you to optimize your use of historical newspapers to discover information about your ancestors or a time period. The author focused mainly on American newspapers. He started by providing a brief history of newspapers, especially how they handled death notices and such. He used many examples of how someone's research turned up interesting information, often in unexpected spots. He talked about the types of things to look for in the newspapers, like birth notices, marriage announcements, death notices, divorces, and community articles.

He covered free-to-use and pay-to-use historical newspaper archive sites and how to use their different features. He also covered ethnic and international newspapers. He explained things like how to search for names that may have a variety of spellings or a name which also belongs to a famous person (but not the person you're interested in). Overall, I found this to be an informative and useful book of tips on this topic.

I received an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. I have been trying to research my family tree and do not want to pay a fortune to do it. This book gave advice on how to find old articles about ancestors of mine. Definitely useful information.

Information given in the time line that newspapers have traveled over their history. Some data given on what still has copyright restrictions and how to hunt for sources on line. Having knowledge of doing my own family history I have discovered that newspapers do hold a wealth of information that is probably not obtainable anywhere else. The downside of doing this type of research is getting easily distracted with all the other articles on the page and of course it being a secondary research tool the data cannot always be relied upon. One of my personal experiences was finding a death notice in a paper only to look at the next edition to find out that he did not really die. Kind of a big boo boo. So I consider this a go to guide but I did not absorb any new revelations. This book was provided by F+W Media Family Tree Books via Netgalley with no requirements for a review. Comments here are my honest opinion."

Books on how to research family history are sometimes too information-intense, frequently dry, often describe outdated research methods, and always are appealing to readers interested in genealogy. I liked the writing style of The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide - clear, concise, interesting and accurate.

The sections are sensibly organized, and the methods suggested seem valid although the websites listed may or may not be around in the future (which is beyond the author's control). Helpful worksheets are included, and I liked that microfilm and digitized records were referenced.

After reading the book, I feel more confident in navigating the uncertain area of genealogy, and think it is definitely a useful guide for the beginning family history researcher..

Thank you to Netgalley, the Publishers and the Author for this review copy, given in exchange for an honest review.

I have worked on my family history for many years now and am always looking for further information which will help me to get more out of my searching. This book looked interesting as there can be a wealth of information gained from old newspapers, and anything to help find this information is a help! This book says it is a how to guide to harvest this information, and gives step by step examples, case studies, templates and much more to use and work from.

It was a lovely book with plenty of information but it is an American book, so the vast majority of information and examples are from the U.S. Whilst one newspaper is much the same as the other, so the way of searching will be more or less the same, I did find it slightly off-putting with so much American information! If you're from the U.S then this book would be great. If you're like myself and from the UK, it is still an interesting book but you may not find some information relevant.