Research the history of your home - tutorial five: Newspapers

Readers of this space by now will have realized that some of our best images come from newspapers. But are they useful when researching your house? Yes—but probably not for the reasons you might think.

For example, upon learning the death date of someone who lived in your house, you might go looking for an obituary. Nowadays just about all of us will receive a glowing short biography a few days after our death. That is a fairly recent phenomenon; a century ago, most ordinary people received a one sentence death notice. Marriage announcements reached their zenith in the decades after World War II, often containing minute descriptions of wedding parties, but have since gone into decline. Birth announcements at any period have been rare.

You are also not likely to find a notice of the construction and initial sale of your house. Houses were often custom built for a particular buyer and were not advertised on the open market. You are much more likely to find an ad for your house placed at a later sale date.

What are newspapers good for? The advent of searchable text has made them quite useful. You can, for example, search for your exact address in quotes, and every instance of its appearance will be available to you in seconds. The same is true for the names of particular people who lived in your house.

For Melrose research, we have two favorite newspaper websites. One is the Boston Public Library’s newspaper collection, here: www.bpl.org/resources-types/newspapers/. While there are many, many newspapers available there, the most important one for Melrose research is the Boston Globe. The other is the pay site https://www.genealogybank.com/, which has the largest collection of Boston newspapers online. Unfortunately, no Melrose newspaper has yet been added to these collections, which means that microfilm at the Melrose Public Library is your only option for local coverage.

Perhaps the best thing about newspapers are the accidental discoveries. We found these lovely drawings of street scenes of Melrose Square from 1901 while looking for something else. Who knows what else is waiting to be found?