Newspaper Clippings

 

One of my favorite resources for Old Reno County is www.newspaperarchive.com.  You can read from almost two million pages of Hutchinson newspapers, using their searchable index. 

Newspaperarchive.com is $5.99 a month if you’re billed annually, or it’s $11.99 a month if you want to pay by the month.  I’ve had it for several years.  It’s taught me so much about my family’s lives here in Reno County.  Everything from when and where they took trips or attended social events, to where and whom they traded real estate with.  Even who was arrested or who got a traffic ticket.  You’ll find out which school your ancestors attended during which years, maybe even what sort of prizes, honors, or activities they had.  And of course the vital information about their past:  births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. 

What I wonder about is the best way to save the articles. 

With paper, you just cut it out, then paste it into a scrapbook.  Done. 

If you’re sharing your family tree online, it’s a little different.  Not harder, just different.  The best reason for having family genealogy facts online is so that multiple family members can access it or add to it on their computers. 

This is how I do it:

Find the article you want.  Newspaperarchive.com shows you the whole newspaper page as a PDF file, using whatever version you have of Adobe Acrobat Reader in your computer. 

  Of course, your computer screen is smaller than a newspaper page.  Scroll around, click and drag, or use the search/find box to move around the newspaper page to find your desired article. 

Whole Page Not Fitting. 

 

Whole article, still not fitting.

 

This fits – just the blurb itself.

 

To end up with the finished product (the reader-friendly little blurb about my ancestors, above), I used the “select” or the “marquee zoom” tool in the PDF newspaper page.  Once you’ve selected (drawn a square around) the part of the page you want to save, it is automatically saved to your clipboard.  Meaning that you can now open up Paint (a program on your computer – sometimes found under “Accessories” if not immediately found under “Programs”).  Once Paint is open, click “paste” or do the control/v thing.  The blurb you selected from the PDF whole newspaper page should show up. 

At this point, you can size it, or add text to the image, or even create markings on it so that it looks like certain things have been highlighted in yellow ink. 

I often use the text function in Paint to add the name of the newspaper, plus the date of the article.  This is the same as writing on the back of a photo or annotating an article to include the name and date. 

When you have it as you want it,  click “save as” so you can name the blurb something.  If you didn’t add text to the image’s margin, this would be a good time to save the blurb as something like this:  “Bob and Betty Smith Hutch News Jan 1 1968.” 

Then, once you’re in www.ancestry.com or in whatever online medium you use to build your tree, just click “upload” and then search your computer for the file of that name. 

-- Cordelia Brown