What's New At Local History and Genealogy is a monthly feature of our web site and is designed to inform our readers about the latest acquisitions of the Local History and Genealogy Division of the Mobile Public Library where Ms. Eckert is an Historian Associate. This column also appears monthly in the Mobile Genealogical Society's newsletter. For many genealogists a welcome source of information on ancestors are the newspapers of the era.
Newspapers give an accurate picture of what life was like for our ancestors.
At Local History we have the Mobile newspapers dating back to 1819 on microfilm. In addition to the Mobile paper we have many books which contain abstracts from newspapers. These books are especially helpful to the genealogist because they are generally indexed, and a quick check will reveal whether an ancestor is listed or not. The abstracts of newspaper articles in the books are usually legal notices, death notices, lists of unclaimed letters in post offices, and marriage notices. It was compiled by Michael Kelsey, Nancy Graff Floyd, and Ginny Guinn Parsons, and was published by Heritage Books, Inc. in 1996.