If you know the dates of your ancestors’ births, marriages and deaths, how can you flesh out the details of their lives? Look to the source of news and views from their own time: newspapers!

Local newspapers can provide a wealth of information: they typically ran stories on the national and international level that they received from other sources, as well as local reports about events and people in the area. This allows you to find out what was happening in the world at large on important dates in your family research, in addition to finding information specific to your relatives.

There are libraries and repositories that hold microfilms of local papers, such as the Glenbow Library and Archives, but this requires a visit which may not be convenient. Fortunately, more resources are becoming available on-line all the time. Check out the Early Alberta Newspapers at OurFutureOurPast and search by location or date. Additionally, choose the Find Newspapers option on Peel’s Prairie Provinces, then select a newspaper or search directly by a person’s name in all papers at once. Do use both sources as they have different amounts of coverage for each location.

Examples of the types information that can be found include where people went to school or worked; even high school grades were sometimes published! Details about marriages (including what everyone wore), births, deaths and funerals can also be discovered in old newspapers. They even record when, where and why people moved from one locality to another, and thus may solve the puzzle of what became of a relative you have not been able to trace in other records. What puzzles can they solve for you?

This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.