Enrichment · Passion Projects

Every mention, dated,
paged and findable.

Old newspapers hold the everyday record of a life: a wedding, a visit to a sister, a fire at the mill, an obituary. Finding them takes patience, and the finds are easy to lose. Log each one with its paper, date and page, note what you searched, and let the organizer point to the next places to look.

Start a searchWhat you get
$5one-time · every device you sign in on
Buy · $5

Included with the Caveat Academy pass and Whole-school licenses. Or get it in the Passion projects kit, $39 for 34 items.

Your searches

The worked example is made up: a woman traced from her 1898 wedding to her 1931 obituary, and a 1966 mill fire. Saved on this device only.

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What you get

Enrichment · Passion Projects$5

What you finish with
A record per person, family or event: the place, years searched, year of death, other spellings, every mention with paper, date, page, kind and where it was read, and eight search habits. Counts mentions, full citations and the span of years; flags missing page numbers, years past Chronicling America’s range, a death with no obituary found and a search done only online.
Who it is for
Family historians, local history students and anyone researching a person, house or event in their town.
Format
Browser organizer with a saved record per search. Prints one search, every search in a table or a blank sheet; downloads a spreadsheet (.csv); exports and imports a file.
Access
$5 one-time, yours on every device you sign in on; the tool opens once you are signed in with it. Included with the Caveat Academy pass and Whole-school licenses. Also in the Passion projects kit ($39) and the Enrichment Suite pass ($119), and 1 more bundle. Everything you type stays in this browser; nothing is sent to Caveat.
Where it lives
The Passion Projects space in Caveat Enrichment.
Support
Questions about access, an order or a correction: team@caveatacademic.com.

How to use it

  1. Name the person or event, the place and the years.
  2. List other spellings and married names.
  3. Log each mention with paper, date and page.
  4. Mark the search habits as you try them.
  5. Follow the flags to the next searches.

Start a search

Where to look

Where a life shows up in the paperFamily newsBirth noticesEngagements and weddingsAnniversariesObituaries and cards ofthanksLocal columnsVisits, illnesses,school honorsChurch and club newsLetters from nearbytownsPublic recordLegal notices: probate,land, divorceCourt news and tax listsBusiness advertisementsWhere a life shows up in the paperFamily newsBirth noticesEngagements and weddingsAnniversariesObituaries and cards of thanksLocal columnsVisits, illnesses, school honorsChurch and club newsLetters from nearby townsPublic recordLegal notices: probate, land, divorceCourt news and tax listsBusiness advertisements
Small-town columns are the richest and the hardest to search: names appear once, in a list, often as initials.

Citing a mention

A usable citation names the newspaper, the town it was published in, the full date and the page and column: Cedar Rapids Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), 14 June 1898, p. 3, col. 2. Save an image of the page with it.

Why searches miss

Online text comes from machine reading of old type, which garbles letters. A name that never comes up in a search may still be on the page. Browse the issues around a known date before deciding it is not there.

Sources

  1. Library of Congress. Chronicling America: historic American newspapers, 1756 to 1963 (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov).
  2. National Endowment for the Humanities. National Digital Newspaper Program (neh.gov).
  3. Mills, E. S. (2017). Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace (3rd ed., rev.). Genealogical Publishing.
  4. National Archives and Records Administration. Genealogy resources: newspapers (archives.gov/research/genealogy).

The worked examples are made up; the people, the papers’ contents and the fire are invented. Nothing you type is sent to Caveat. Support: team@caveatacademic.com.