Access Newspaper Database and Newspaper Archive Academic , which are related, have me quite frustrated. A researcher at a distance provided me some notes via text of two death/funeral/burial/obituary announcements and since I've used this database in the past to locate copies of originals, I thought I would try.
Since my experience has been that in many small town newspapers that were typeset there re a lot of misspellings of proper names, as if they had run out of one vowel and used another, I decided that the best tactic would be to go the exact newspaper and date and page that the other researcher had provided me.
I would have preferred to have rolled microfilm and read page by page.
I wasted over an hour trying to make the database simply get me to the paper on the date specified, if not the exact page, WITHOUT ALSO PUTTING IN THE NAME, first and last.
Finding the WRONG date, I read the language the paper used. Maybe it was my terminology?
I tried obituary. I tried funeral. I tried died. Certainly something should come up!
Once again I returned the search choices, this time with a librarian at my side to double check my moves.
I think Access should make it easy to get to the newspaper, by date, for those of us who would prefer to read it page for page, rather than only focusing on what comes up in a search.
