Google Digitizes the Ottawa Citizen Archives

February 03, 2010

Google Digitizes the Ottawa Citizen Archives

Google has digitized and made available online most of the archives of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, putting about 2.5 million articles at your fingertips, the earliest from 1890. You may be amazed at the speed and ease with which you can find family history.

Most genealogy researchers often have only a vague notion of a date, like the mid-1950s, for something as simple as a death notice. Finding the article on microfilm may require hours of mechanically loading one microfilm roll after another, always worried that, in a bleary-eyed state, you might skip right over the piece. Sometimes you can find the article in a few hours. Some searches may require days.

Contrast that with Google's online database. Enter the person's name and "Voila!" All references to that name in the archives appear on your screen within two or three seconds. If it is a common name, you may have to spend a few minutes clicking on the various titles until you find "your" man or woman. Contrast that to the hours or days required to do the same thing on microfilm.

One word of caution: The digital archive has some unexplained time gaps. Some obvious stories are completely missed. The new online tool certainly is not perfect but it is much better than previous research methodologies.

Google plans to digitize all the major Canwest dailies, with completion expected later this year.

Google's Advanced News Archive Search also contains the contents of a few hundred other newspaper archives and is available free of charge at http://news.google.ca/archivesearch/advanced_search