On 4 December, I mentioned using the FamilySearch Experimental Full-Text Search to find a record of my two-time great-grandfather, William Henry Northwood. He took out US citizenship on 8 June 1887 in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Shortly afterwards, I found more about him thanks to a collection of names and stories on MyHeritage. AI extracted it from OldNews.com newspaper pages found in the Fort Griffin (Texas) Echo of 1 November 1879.
Now available, based on newspapers, are:
658 million records from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi,
998 million records from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska,
1 billion records for Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania,
651 million records from North Carolina, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia.
More is coming. Expected to be published this month are 16 similar collections “covering the entire United States and several additional countries.”
It’s a good bet that Canadian newspapers will be included. MyHeritage already has a Canada Newspapers, 1752-2007 collection, originating from Google’s abandoned newspaper digitization initiative. That goes back to Ottawa-based Paper of Record. Stay tuned.
According to Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage “This AI is designed to extract not just names from the newspaper articles but also the relatives of every person mentioned, as well as additional fields such as occupations, residences, travel from one location to another, and more.”
Find out more in this MyHeritage blog post.