On the last blog post Newspapers and Their Dates – Alabama, I talked about the dates on old newspaper and how on some scanned newspapers there are more than one issue under a single date.
On one of the blog post screen prints I circles a name on the obit page, Mr Bynum:
After I had posted the blog piece I decided to create a tree for Mr Bynum and put his obit on it.
I created the tree, put his obit on it and then continued to find more obits and records for members of “Bert’s” family. Notice Elbert Luther Bynum is the home person of the tree.
As you can see I was able to find many more people for his tree and also found many other obits for members of his family.
As my readers know I prepare a text file for each tree I create from an old newspaper item so this is the text file I created for the tree.
Elbert Luther “Bert” Bynum – obit – Apr 1986 – Florida – Family Tree
owner: josemunoz2546
https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/170413024/family/familyview
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64 people on tree
19 names on tree:
Alldredge, Anderson, Bradford, Bryant, Bynum, Garlington, Kolker, Leeth, Mann, McCullars, MIller, Pactor, Riggins, Self, Sloan, Thomas, Thompson, Turner, Wade
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Created using info off of an obit – Gadsden, Alabama
Gadsden Times – Apr 19, 1986
See to right and up of this link
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J3spAAAAIBAJ&sjid=RdcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3490%2C1571379
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Notice that on the text file above there are 64 people and 19 surnames on the tree.
Notice also that the name of the tree and the link to the tree is all on one small text file.
Also there is a link to the newspaper with a date and name for the newspaper in case the link gets lost.
The format took many years to develop and I tweaked it as I created new trees and thought about the future generations who would find the tree in the GFO research location.
I think I have come up with the perfect text file to capture the pertinent information for a tree.
The tree text file captures the information off of the obit found on an old newspaper.
Here is that obit:
Notice there are three (3) versions of the obit.
The long one is the original as we saw on the news page (see news page at beginning of post). Since the original is a long vertical screen shot, it comes onto the tree in a very small format
so I crop it to make it into a square which will come into the tree in a larger size and will fit better in the profile box of the Ancestry dot com tree file.
In this case I had to crop it one more time to arrange the information in a more logical format.
By rearranging the information I put the family items in one place and the funeral and burial information in another. I do this to make it easier for the relatives to read.
So from the obit in the old newspaper I was able to create a tree and was able to find other items in other issues of the old newspaper, as you can see in the tree gallery.
Also notice that there is a screen print that says “No Newspaper for this death date.” and I use this sign to show that I looked for a newspaper for the death date but I was unable to find a newspaper for it. The Google News Archive collection does not have every day for every year of the particular newspapers so sometimes we can not find an issue much less an obit. The sign put on the person saves me from looking for an obit for that person and will save future generations from looking for an obit that is not in the Google News Archive collection. Now there might be other newspaper web sites that have an issue for the date but I mainly work with the Google News Archive collection.
Here is a sample of the “No Newspaper…”
I tried to find the obit for the date but there were no newspapers for the 07 Apr 1980 date.
To recap,
I saw an obit on a previous blog post.
I created a tree for Elbert Luther Bynum and was able to find other obit’s for the family.
I cropped the vertical long obit to make it fit better on the profile page box.
I showed how sometimes I have to rearrange the text file for the obit because the obit information structure has family information all over the place, not in an orderly format. and
finally I show how I created and use a tag that says “No Newspaper…” to help me organize the family tree and help the future research that will be done by other genealogist.
I hope this helps you with your future genealogical research.
Thank You.
Jose from Clarkston, Michigan, USA
Just in case the link above did not work, here it is:
Genealogical Collection 
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