When I was thinking this morning about something to highlight for Follow Friday, there was one thing that stuck out among many. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online. My father’s family may be from Ireland but they spent a good 40 years in Brooklyn. This site is probably the best find I’ve ever made. It’s also the only reason I’m not crying like a baby that my local library changed it’s policy for using NewspaperArchive.com.
It’s a project that’s run by the Brooklyn Public Library. The years cover 1841-1902! Those are wonderful years because it encompasses the big Irish immigration. Those years make me giddy just looking at them.
What I love about this collection is searching it isn’t impossible. I’m so easy to please, but in the last 2 years this site has grown in leaps and bounds! You can search by choosing a month and year and then picking a day. The other method is choosing a date range. My first foray into this website I was looking for any mention of the death of William H Moore’s wife, Mary ?. So I was just searching random with a date range between Jan 1880 and Dec 1900 because I knew she died between the censuses.
Another plus is that the articles are highlighted. So you can choose an article and see it full size in a new window.Now when I was doing my search I was going through many searches, hoping to find my Mary.
This is more inline with what I was looking through in my search. Ancestry members will notice it’s set up the same way Ancestry does Newspaper and Periodicals records. So using quotations in the keywords search is a very good idea!
Eventually I came across this mention. Death date is between 1880 and 1900, the age matches what my Mary would be, William H Moore is her husband and the address on Sumpter Street is one they used in the censuses. Then I noticed that there would be a follow up “later.” Instead of pouring through the search results anymore, I noted the date of this article, October 5, 1896, and I went to the next day’s article using the Calendar search.
That was where I found her obituary. What’s great is this gives much more information. It gives me the name of their Church where I will probably find births and marriages for her children. This confirms the time they spent in Brooklyn since moving there from a brief stint in Chicago. My Mary did indeed leave behind a husband, daughter, and three sons. Later, I would find the family in the 1892 New York State Census. That would show me that my Mary was still alive in 1892, leaving her death occuring between Jun 1892 and Jun 1900. Can I be 100% positive that this Mary is mine? Not really but I ordered the death certificate anyway. That didn’t have any information on Mary’s parents, but I’m still not giving up! Unfortunately, I’m no closer to finding out about Mary before she married. I am however I am 98% sure this is my Mary. Without this online newspaper I’d still be looking for what happened to Mary between 1880 and 1900. That’s a huge 20 year gap that this collection filled for me.
Now I’ll show you a bit more of the search pages.
You saw this screen before, now I’ll show you about navigating inside the newspaper view.
Under the features menu, you can go straight to the next or previous issue or you can download the whole issue in PDF format. I didn’t have much luck with searching in the PDF format, but I don’t usually use that method so I could be doing it wrong. You can go through the paper page by page by using the arrows. You can see the Dec 9, 1902 issue had a total of 20 pages. The Page menu only has one option which is Print.
In the article view you have 4 little icons on the right. They are the same options you see in the ‘Article’ Menu on the left.
- Save to My Collection: This is a great option. I use this to save articles that look like I’ll want to come back to. You can access you collection from the main menu on the left side of the Newspaper View page.
- Send by Email: This is just a basic form. It asks for your name and email, and the email you want to send the article to. It also gives space for a message and Subject if you’d like to send it to a family member.
- Print: Obviously this allows you to Print the articles. What’s great is it brings up a very printer friendly window. It allows you to change the Image Orientation (Portrait, Landscape), Paper Size and Scaling. That’s a very cool thing to have. That way you don’t have to change your printer settings.
- Save as HTML: Click this will bring up the article in a window that gives you instructions on saving the article to your hard drive.
This is the Advanced Search options. You can enter your keywords. I love the Time Period selection. You can choose Date Range if you’d like a smaller or bigger range. Below that you can choose which content you’d like to search: All Content, Articles, Pictures, or Ads. Finally you can choose how you’d like to sort your results: Score (How close it is to your search terms), Title, Word Count, Date Ascending or Date Descending.
This website is a MUST for anyone who is trying to research Brooklyn relatives!
Are you familiar with fultonhistory.com? They have all the Brooklyn Eagles from the time period covered by the Brooklyn Public Library, but also . . . well, for a long time after that. I’m not sure exactly how far, but I know I’ve used it for death notices through the 40s, at least. The site also has many other public domain NYS newspapers, including other NYC papers. The search function is not NEARLY as easy to use (or as pretty) as the one at the PBL’s site (and they don’t highlight your search terms, but using CTRL+F helps), but I find that in using both, sometimes one finds things that the other doesn’t, and vice versa. I don’t know what dates your family was in Brooklyn, but I found Fulton History very useful for mine, since they stayed well past the period that the PBL Daily Eagle project covers.
I didn’t know about that site! I’m definitely going to check it out. My family was in Brooklyn until 1920 at least, so there is definitely a gap at where the PBL site ends. I’ve been trying to find a death notice for between 1910 and 1920, and then 1925 I hope. I’d be interested in seeing other NYC papers also, because other branches of my family were there.
Thanks so much!