You are probably familiar with the Old Fulton New York Post Cards New York historical newspaper database since it has been “finding the angels and the devils in the family tree since 2003,” but I still feel it worthwhile to mention. I have known about this website for several years, but I never spent much time on it until recently. This was because I was under the false impression that it was basically a database of upstate New York newspapers which would not help me in my research. And then there are also certain other aspects of the website that I just don’t get. Some of it seems whimsical, which caused me not to take this valuable website as seriously as I should have, but after searching the database more, I realized this is a serious website for anyone researching a New York family that lived almost anywhere in the state. It has become one of my favorite free genealogical websites.
The site has over 18 million scanned pages of New York historical newspapers. Although, many of the newspapers are upstate ones, there is a good sampling of downstate papers too. For example, included in the line-up of newspapers are the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Suffolk County News. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the Old Fulton NY Post Cards database includes issues published from 1841 to 1955. This is a larger time span than what the Brooklyn Public Library’s database offers, which is 1841 to 1902. The Suffolk County Library System’s Suffolk Historic Newspaper database has Suffolk County News, but there is a gap in their coverage from 1961 up to 1996. The Old Fulton database fills in much of that gap by including issues between 1961 and 1986. There are many other interesting newspapers included in this database, and if you would like to see a list of them, you will find one on the website.
Database content is important, but a good search engine is also needed. First let me point out that Google does search and access the Old Fulton New York Post Cards. However, the Old Fulton search engine is pretty impressive, and you will probably get better or more results by using it. Once at the Old Fulton search box, you can choose from any of the following commands: all of the words, any of the words, the exact phrase, and Boolean. If you want to get the most out of your searches, I recommend reading the “FAQ Help Index” to fully understand all the searching options. When searching for articles on ancestors by using their first names and surnames, I like using the Boolean search. This allows you to narrow your search by using the combination of first and last name within a specified closeness of each other. For example, if I wanted articles on a John Dempsey, my Boolean search might be John w/1 Dempsey. The “exact phrase” option, I have found helpful when researching the address an ancestor lived at. You can also select “Fuzzy Searching” to compensate for any OCR possible (optical character recognition) problems with interpretation, sometimes a very useful method.
When you click on an article of interest in your search results, the article will be brought up as a PDF file. If the search terms are not highlighted on the page, there is a plugin for Acrobat 10 you can download from Adobe that will do this, but you can still usually find the terms easily enough without it. When the article fully appears on the screen, you just right click anywhere on the page and select find. Type in the term or words you want to find in the article, and a box will appear over that area of the article in which the term appears. This article search ability feature makes looking through the results much easier and faster.
As you can see, the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website has a lot to offer, and the added bonus is that it is free (donations are welcomed). The website claims that new material is added every Sunday night, which makes it a growing archive. For New York family researchers, this is an excellent website to keep going back to. http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html
