Iowa Newspaper Archives

Tips for Searching Iowa Newspapers Online

So you have a person, place or thing that you want to find more information about. We know Iowa newspaper archives, as with all our archive, is a valuable resource for genealogy research in Iowa and beyond. We know it often contains obituaries, marriage announcements, and other information about ancestors with surrounding events. But where do you start? That’s easy! A good place to start is with a simple first name and last name search. Then you can try adding additional keywords that could be relevant. Are you looking for military service information? Drop the first name and focus on the last name as a keyword then mix up the service they were in or related terms. Pfc Donovan, stationed in… “Donovan” and “stationed” searching in your best guess of year range for service could be the piece you’re looking for. Not all articles are written as complete sentences or how you would naturally speak them so break out your best, “Just the facts ma’am” and search what you know. Yes, I just quoted Joe Friday from Dragnet, I’m getting old. You get the idea.

Here are some more techniques that you’ll get good at overtime to get you started

• Expand your geographical search. Don't limit your search solely to the papers in your relative's hometown or other known locations, spread out! Search towns and settlements in the surrounding areas. Searching the areas that you know is a good start, but it shouldn't end there. It was not uncommon for news stories to travel, being picked up by various newspapers, especially if the person featured in the story had family in that area or had once lived there. Remember those society pages in the paper? So and so’s aunt visited from Chicago last Tuesday…
• Expand your familial search and go outside of it. It may seem like the best course of action is to focus on your direct ancestors only. And if you prefer that, that's fine. But searching siblings, in-laws, extended family, and even teammates or coworkers can provide you with key information on those direct ancestors. Imagine how many times a community group or school photo listed all the people and not a single one was family but they all appeared together in the paper.
• Narrow your search. It is not unusual to get a lot of search results on some names, especially if they are common like Smith or Jackson. That can be a lot of work if you have to read through them all and weed out the ones that are not related to your search. You can avoid some of the research noise by narrowing your search. Include middle names, maiden names, city names, and other specific information. This will give you more relevant results. You’ll get the hang of it in no time!
• Spell creatively. In the early days journalists took handwritten notes, many documents were handwritten, and this leaves a lot of room for errors in spelling. Peters could be recorded as Paters. Smith could be recorded as Smite. It can make your search a little challenging but after some practice you’ll get comfortable with common misspellings and when to mix up your search of the name.
• Remember that not that long ago the Mrs. was basically just published as the Mr.! Keep the "Mrs. husband's name" in mind. Up until the 1950s and even into the 60s and 70s many married women would take on their husband's name – literally. Sally Smith Brown married Donovan Brown and she would write her name as Mrs. Donovan Brown. This is very common to find so knowing what to look for will make your family tree discoveries easier to find.
• Stories aren't always published on the day they occurred. Often a story will run days or even weeks after the event happened and in different regions. This was especially true in the early days and with smaller newspapers. So, when you search, expand your timeline at least a few weeks after the event occurred. Often small newspapers will publish at certain times, meaning that they could appear weeks later. Some newspapers published a paper every day while others would only print a paper once a month.
• Expand your dates. You may have specific dates but that doesn't mean that you can do an adequate search with those dates. Sometimes dates got recorded wrong or were incomplete, so give yourself a little cushion and keep the dates flexible. It’s always good to remember no newspaper archive is 100% accurate in how the articles were indexed. There will be times when something looks right but the date doesn’t seem correct, there’s a chance that it’s just been catalog on the incorrect date on accident. So if you find a page like that make sure to let us know. We’ll fix it for you in no time!