Using a Newspaper Morgue or Archive Database to Find Friends and Relatives

Ever wonder what happened to that long lost relative, or a friend you haven't seen for 30 years? If you've exhausted ordinary channels such as Classmates.com, or online sleuth, why not give newspaper archive databases a try?

My second cousin, Louise, was born in the same town I was but, as a young woman, she moved to California and I didn't see nor hear from her for many years. My mother, who was her first cousin, corresponded frequently with her, and after the death of my mother, I began to exchange Christmas cards and small tidbits of family news once a year, as did my older sister.

In Christmas, 2007, we both received chatty Christmas letters from Louise, informing us, among other things, of her husband's death. We were sorry to hear that news, and both sent a short note of condolence to her.

This year, as usual, I sent Louise a Christmas card, only to have it returned, stamped with the message, "moved, left no forwarding address." I thought it strange, but when I didn't receive the usual greeting from her, I called my sister to find that she, too, had received her card back, and no Christmas greeting from our cousin.

Since the once a year card exchange was almost our only communication, I was tempted to drop the matter and just think that she wasn't interested in maintaining a rather flimsy relationship with relatives she hadn't seen in years, but I did go online and explore places like Classmates.com, etc., to see whether I might be able to find where she had disappeared to. I didn't really have a lot of money to spend tracing someone who might not appreciate being traced, and I knew hardly anything about her family, except that her husband had died during the previous year.

Then I remembered a friend of mine saying she had looked up the date of a relative's divorce, in the archive database of our local newspaper. They used to call them, morgues, but now they are archive databases.

Hmm, I thought. Maybe I could put a newspaper archive database to work for me. My cousin had written that she and her husband had celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, not long before he died. And then there was his obituary. Those two pieces of information might help me track down Louise, if I could get into the newspaper archive in their town.

I knew Louisa had lived in Modesto, California, so I ran a Google search for newspaper archives, Modesto, CA. Within a few seconds, I was on the website of the Modesto Bee, and by clicking on the word archives and entering a date span that I wanted the search to cover, the Modesto Bee search engine came up. I typed my cousin's name into the blank, and was given the first 3 lines of several different articles concerning Louisa.

Unfortunately, one was her death notice, but since we hadn't heard from her, we had assumed that this was a possibility. A second was an article telling covering the golden wedding anniversary, and a third was about Louisa winning a trip to Hawaii the previous year. She had often told us of the contests she entered and won, and this was one of her bigger prizes.

The Modesto Bee charged a fee of $3.95 to bring up any complete article which I thought was reasonable. When you do pay for an article, it remains available online for 24 hours, during which time you can e-mail family or friends so they can also view it, or make as many copies as desired. I did make copies of Louisa's obituary, which included a nice photo of her, and am sending them to other family members who might remember her.

The most interesting thing to me about discovering how to use a newspaper archive database, other than finding the information I was seeking, of course, was that you can search for anything a particular newspaper has ever printed if you have some idea of the time frame. They give you just enough of the article to help you decide whether it contains the information you were searching for before you pay them any money. Conceivably, you could look up topics all day long, just out of curiosity and never pay a cent. If you do decide you want to see an entire article, there is a convenient payment button, and a link for the article appears as soon as your payment is made.

Give it a try. If you moved away from your home town and want to know what ever happened to your favorite English teacher, bring up the newspaper archives for that town and fill in a time span of several years during which the teacher may have retired. The whole town may have thrown a retirement party for him as he prepared to move to Africa to spend his retirement years doing humanitarian work---or he may have been caught skimming the lunch money he was supposed to turn in and ended up speding those years in a less admirable occupation.

You never know what may turn up at the morgue, but I can assure you that you will experience very few dull moments when you spend an afternoon searching a newspaper archive database.