Birth Notices: Going Beyond Birth Certificates

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Birth notices are announcements made in newspapers, usually local ones. Along with death notices or obituaries and local articles, birth notices can give the kind of detail that public records like birth certificates won't be able to give.

The reason why family historians and sundry researchers normally spend lots of time going through newspaper archives is because there is so much birth notices say about a person's roots and heritage. If the newspaper is out of print, its archives can probably be found at a local library or historical society. In short, if it's not too long ago, the information you need might still be within arms' reach.

Birth Notices: Why a Newspaper Search?

Even when families can't afford to take out birth notices and death notices, the local newspaper archives can still be worth looking into.

There's this story of a woman, originally from Ohio, trying to trace her family. She was adopted and later moved out of state. Checking birth certificates in the area didn't help, but a search of death certificates (the collection of which preceded birth certificates) led to a clue.

A man with the surname she wanted died in 1922. The cause: farming accident. As death certificates normally do, this one also showed the time, date, and place of death.

A search of local newspaper archives yielded no death notices, nor birth notices connected to the family. What it did yield was an old news story. At the height of harvest season, the father of 9 was crushed in his own thresher. His wife had just died 6 months earlier. She'd just given birth to their youngest child.

The tragedy was recounted on the front page. Alongside the story was a photo of 9 kids, the infant carried by the eldest girl, next to the thresher. The photo was taken after the father's funeral.

The woman searching for her family also discovered through the article that the 9 kids were divided among 4 families across Ohio. She and her brother were adopted by one of two families that had moved out of state. She still had family living in Ohio.

Birth Notices: Where to Start a Search

Let's say the newspaper is out of print -- where should you go? The steps you'll take to find the birth notices, death notices, or articles you want will depend on the way private and public archives are handled in the State you are in.

Based on the Ohio example above, as well as other publicly available resources, these are the steps you can take:

1. Check the local historical society if the local newspaper doesn't keep archives back to the date you want.

A newspaper can turn over its archives for several reasons: it is out of print, has changed management, doesn't have the facilities for a repository, etc. In the example above the archives were found at the Ohio Historical Society, which has Ohio newspapers dating as far back as 1785 until today.

Don't be discouraged if the library/society staff can't search articles for you. If they can't, they may make the resources available anyway – as with the Ohio example where you can interlibrary loan the microfilm you need. The society has a database of newspapers here.

Soundex is a surname index that arranges names according to sound, not spelling. It compensates for misspelling of surnames by census takers. Each Soundex entry is made up of the 1^st letter of a surname plus 3 numbers: S530 has the surnames Smith/Smyth/Smythe.

To know more about birth notices and how they can help you in your search for your roots, check out RecordsSiteReview’s Birth Records section.