Beekeepers and Bank Robbers

April 11, 2013

So, I never knew my great grandparents were bee keepers.

This might not sound like a big deal, but when you are researching your family history, finding fun facts like these can make the story that much more complete and interesting. I found a reference to their involvement in a beekeeping convention in a 1920 newspaper article from the Mooresville Times.

We have been discovering a lot of interesting facts about people and events with our new newspaper database. Researchers have found ancestors on both sides of the law (both arrest records and reports of stopping crime). We have found texts of speeches made to the state legislature, how Hoosiers coped with the 1913 flood, and advertisements to early businesses in the state.

Newspapers can be a great source for research and now they are much easier to search and access. The Indiana Historical Society recently partnered with Newspaper Archive to digitize 5,625 reels of microfilm, which represents more than 2.5 million newspaper page images dated 1924 or earlier. Now, 760 individual Indiana newspaper titles representing the vast majority of the state are now available for research on the web. Researchers can search newspaper pages by keyword or browse particular issues. To make the news even better, folks can access the database for free in the reference room of IHS?s William Henry Smith Memorial Library.

The Library is open to the public fro 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. If you are unable to visit, personal subscriptions are available for purchase through NewspaperArchive.com. Come and try the new database maybe your ancestor was a beekeeper or a bank robber!

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Suzanne Hahn is director of reference services for the IHS Collections and Library. She loves helping people find the information they seek and is perhaps the only librarian ever to get shushed for laughing too loud in a library.

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