Every year the amount of choices you have for genealogy resource pages is increasing, and you have to pick and choose where to spend your subscription money unless you’re a millionaire.
Many people turn to Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank.com if newspaper analysis is what you’re doing.
Take a brief look at how side-by-side the two websites line up, and then we can dig into more details.
| Website | GenealogyBank.com | Newspapers.com |
| Biggest claim to fame | More than 250 million obituaries | More than 400 million pages of newsprint |
| Newspapers | Obituaries, articles, and scanned pages from 9,600 different newspapers | Scanned pages from more than 8,700 different newspapers |
| Other records | Social Security Death Index, government publications, and historical books | None |
| Areas covered | United States only | United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Panama |
| Subscription plans | Monthly or annual. See pricing. | Monthly or semi-annual. See pricing. |
| Trial period | Half off first month | 7-day free trial |
Newspapers
Newspapers are the prime appeal to both Newspapers.com and GenalogyBank.com. Both sites house impressive collections that can support anyone with their investigation into family history.
But each site has its own noticeably different core selection from the other. It is important to know the variations to pick the best place for you.
Why Newspapers?
So why is it so necessary in the first place to have access to newspapers?
When it comes to genealogy and family history, newspapers are an incredible source of knowledge. They are first-hand accounts, not stories handed down over the centuries, published at the moment. And to put the lives of your ancestors into view, they go beyond the mere locations and dates of many other records.
Any of the types of stories in newspapers that you can notice include:
- Memorials and obituaries
- Notices on birth and christening
- Enrollment in education, rolls of honor, graduation lists, and other news
- Engagements, bridal showers, celebrations and even plans for honeymoons
- Travel schedules or reviews of travel returns
- Judicial notices, hearings in court, and sales of land
- Membership of social clubs and fraternal societies and news from them
- Enlistments in or unification of the Armed Forces
- All and everything else in their lives that people do
In certain examples, you could also dig up your ancestor’s portrait or image that you never imagined existed.
Newspapers at Newspapers.com
Newspapers.com is all about newspapers, as you might infer only by the site. Their selection contains digital scans of over 400 million newspaper pages from over 8,700 different publications, and is growing on a regular basis. Every month, they add millions of pages.
At Newspapers.com, there are two sets. Their Simple Kit features more than 100 million historical newspaper pages. It mostly encompasses the period from 1700 to about the 1960s. It contains several more modern journals, but generally, when it comes to recent publications, it provides restricted choices.
Both 400 million pages, plus a large treasure chest of more recent newspapers, are available via the Publisher Extra kit. Quite frequently, full print runs of several large (and minor) newspapers running all the way up to 2018 from the 1960s can be seen. For study on your more modern ancestors, this is fine.
Newspapers.com contains full multimedia photographs, not single posts, of the newspaper website in each case.
Newspapers at GenealogyBank.com
Obituaries are the primary focus of GenealogyBank, and this is mirrored in their collection. Their scans of entire newspaper pages are usually from older publications, although their current series relies mainly on obituaries and other preferred posts.
The collection of GenealogyBank includes more than 9,600 newspapers, with an amazing 95 percent of them not available free anywhere else.
While GenealogyBank has scanned more newspaper pages than Newspapers.com, overall, they have less posts. About why? Many of the publications in the collection of GenealogyBank.com are older papers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Two stuff mean that.
Second, over the past few hundred years, many older newspaper pages have been lost permanently, destroyed either suddenly or at some point.
Second, it did not survive for long for many newspapers. Particularly during the 1800s, new newspapers sprung up all over the country. For starters, Kansas alone had around 700 separate newspapers in print in the year 1887. Most of these articles, all of them less than a year, did not last long. A few of these very short-term newspapers are included in GenealogyBank, which suggests a lot of covered newspapers, but not as many complete pages.
Many modern newspapers, because of their reliance on obituaries, are not full runs, either. There are only obituaries for these newspapers available via GenealogyBank.com, not the rest of the posts.
Other Collections
Newspapers.com has one priority, newspapers, which is extremely beneficial for them. But it is the only set of theirs.
GenealogyBank.com still has a massive selection of newspapers, but when using them, it is not the only choice. They also have links to publications from the nation, history books and the Death Index of Social Security.
Government Publications
For something created by the government, this is a generic term, because it contains a number of different forms of information.
You will, among other items, find:
- Military documents, including lists of losses
- Pension applications from Veterans of the Revolutionary War and Civil War or their widows
- Adoption and other petitions for orphans
- Land or other property grants
When it comes to the types of genealogical data they hold, each document is different, but every one of them has something valuable to give.
Historical Books
People and cultures are proud of their heritage, proud enough to never forget their history. How are they doing that? They’re writing novels.
Thousands of genealogies and family records have already been published, only waiting to find out if you are linked to them. While you can’t take any of them at face value, they offer a foundation that can save you endless hours of study.
Several cities, villages, and counties have also created books on themselves. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this was a particularly common thing to do. Not only do these books speak about the city and how it came to be but they include lists of names and even whole portions of famous residents’ biographies.
In the GenealogyBank set, you can even find historic maps, biographies, town directories, and even sermons and eulogies.
Social Security Death Index (SSDI)
Chances are you have a Social Security Card if you live in the United States, and someday you will apply for welfare (maybe you already have). Since the method was introduced in the 1930s, this has been the case.
Although earlier decades are spotty, the majority of people who have died since about 1971 can be found in the SSDI, especially if at the time of death they were over 65.
Although SSDI is more impersonal than GenealogyBank’s other tools, it can still be a great platform for finding out important information about your ancestors.
Searching
Both websites provide simple searches that are easy to use with enough versatile advanced search options to help you track the data you need.
GenealogyBank helps you to independently scan each of their items, or you can search all of them at once. Instead of having to dig through a lot of other papers, since their obituaries are segregated from the rest of their newspaper archive, that means you have the power to find only obituaries on the names you scan.
GenealogyBank’s advanced search options include restricting the search to a single date or set of dates and adding keywords to the search.
You may also scan for a single location or a single newspaper like most blogs, but GenealogyBank goes one better. The website requires two or three states to be searched at once, two or more towns within a single state, or two or more separate newspapers. You can save a lot of duplicated effort with that extra power.
The ability to delete keywords from your quest is another excellent feature. You will search, in other words, for papers that do not contain a certain phrase. When you are reading papers or obituaries from Philadelphia when you know your ancestors lived in western Pennsylvania somewhere, this is very convenient.
Newspapers.com also provides a number of different search choices. You can also index newspapers by paper and date, or locate unique newspapers depending on place and date, in addition to searching by name, location, dates, and keywords.
Although both pages have decent search options, GenealogyBank has an advanced search page that is cleaner and more intuitive, making it a bit easier to use.
Places and Dates Covered
In the United States, every newspaper in the GenealogyBank database has been published, and their obituaries and other resources are also obtained from the U.S. Within the U.S., they provide outstanding coverage, but none from anywhere else.
Not only does Newspapers.com include the whole United States (including the Guam and Puerto Rico territories), but it also offers links to other English-language newspapers. Newspapers from Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Panama are part of their collection.
Both platforms provide detailed coverage from about 1800 to around the 1960s. With the oldest document in either set dated from 1690, they have more limited choices from the 1700s.
While some of the titles of GenealogyBank include full page scans from more recent years, only obituaries and selected papers from the 1960s to the present are available in many instances.
For a wide variety of publications, Newspapers.com has complete story coverage all the way up to 2018. However, to get access to any of these modern publications, you need to pay to their more pricey Publishers Extra bundle.
Subscriptions
When it comes to subscribing, by month or year, GenealogyBank only has one real choice. Their monthly membership is very expensive, so when you opt for the annual subscription, you get a massive discount (about 70 percent off).
Unfortunately, GenealogyBank does not provide any kind of free trial cycle, but for half of their normal monthly cost, you can get a 30-day trial membership so that you can find out what they have to offer without paying too much.
Both weekly and six-month subscriptions are offered by Newspapers.com. Furthermore, they have two separate types of subscription.
More than 100 million digitized pages from thousands of newspapers are part of their Standard Package. Although some current issues are included the Standard Kit is best for historical newspapers prior to the 1960s in general.
Their Publishers Extra kit allows you access from 8,700 newspapers to all 400 million pages all the way up to now.
Newspapers.com offers their simple kit with a free 7-day trial so that you can take a free peek.
Users of Ancestry.com: If you already belong to the All Access subscription bundle of Ancestry.com, the package provides complete access to the already built-in Basic package of Newspapers.com. But you do have to pay the entire amount for the Publishers Extra kit if you like it.
Summary
You should subscribe to all websites in an ideal universe. Although there is some similarities between them, each of them still host large, exclusive collections.
If you can prefer GenealogyBank.com or Newspapers.com really depends on the most important thing you think.
Newspapers.com is the obvious winner if you want complete access to modern newspapers, but you would have to order the more costly Publishers Extra bundle.
For UK and Canadian media, you will need to go to Newspapers.com.
GenealogyBank.com has an amazing selection of rare older newspapers that you can not find anywhere else. If you want access to their other resource lists, like the Social Security Death Index, history books, and government publications, they’re still your best pick.
Although both websites offer links to obituaries through newspaper searches, if obituaries are your primary focus, GenealogyBank.com is your best option. The website helps you to easier and more reliably check for obituaries, and has an ongoing feed to guarantee that you are still up to date.
So what site you want is up to you, so you’re not going to go wrong either. Today, give them a chance.
