Looking for an Ethnic St. Louis Newspaper?

As you probably know by now, the old headquarters building of St. Louis County Library is closed and the demolition process has begun; a new structure will take its place in a year or so. As the History & Genealogy Department prepared for its move to temporary quarters at the Daniel Boone branch, they had to reassess their holdings and make some decisions on what to keep and what to discard. Accordingly, since many of their newspapers were already digitized and online, they offered StLGS a variety of newspaper microfilms.

The society chose to take a selection of ethnic newspapers that might benefit our members. Carol Whitton, our projects director and leader of the German Special Interest Group (G-SIG), coordinated with Brent Trout, the newly appointed manager of the library's History & Genealogy Department, to sort through the available films. Carol opted to keep the German newspaper microfilms because they were printed in old German Fraktur type. She obtained microfilms for the Westliche Post from September 1857 through June 1938; Anzeiger Des Westens, October 1842 through June 1898; Amerika, October 1872 through June 1914; and a short run of Ostfriesische-Nachtrichten from October 1884 through June 1912. All but the latter are on Newspapers.com, but with some differences in years.

In addition to the German newspaper microfilms, StLGS also received microfilms for a newspaper in French, Le Patriote, 1878–1887, as well as Jewish newspapers in English: Jewish Tribune/Voice/Light covering August 1879–July 1940 and February 1947–September 1958, and Modern View from March 1913 through July 1940.

This amazing gift from St. Louis County Library fills an entire filing cabinet plus an additional drawer in a second cabinet. As you can see from the photos, each of the drawers is chock full of films.

(photos by Ilene Murray; used with permission)

Advantages to Having Access to the Microfilm

StLGS projects director, Carol Whitton, writes, "If the German newspapers are available at Newspapers.com, why would you want to look at microfilms at the StLGS office? The online papers were indexed using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program available for the old German Fraktur type, but the indexing is not as accurate as we might wish. First, there is the problem of blurry, fuzzy, and blotted letters, which gives inaccurate results in English. But additionally, it is unclear exactly what has or has not been indexed in the German papers. For example, were both first name and surname or only the surname indexed? Were only articles indexed or were advertisements, want ads, obituary notices, etc. also indexed?"

Carol says she tested Newspapers.com using the 1886 death of Caspar Diederich Jaeger for whom she had previously located both an article and an obituary notice in Anzeiger Des Westens. 

"First, I checked my two references to see how the name was actually spelled in both the article and the obit because different spellings and inclusions as well as exclusions are possible. In both places, his name was shown as “C. D. Jaeger.” I filled Newspaper.com’s three general search fields: C. D. Jaeger, 1886, St. Louis, Missouri. But, I got NO results! Did they fail to index his initials?”

She further explained, “I modified my search to Jaeger, 1886, St. Louis, Missouri, and specified Anzeiger Des Westens as the newspaper. Then, among other Jaegers, I got ONLY the article result for C. D., NOT the shorter obituary death notice, which was in the same paper on a different page. The obit looks clear to me, so I don’t know why it wasn’t indexed. The heirs’ names listed in that obit, but not in the article, also were not indexed. You can see there may be problems with the indexing.”

In conclusion, Carol says, “Yes, you could search the same newspapers online at Newspapers.com seeking a name yourself by reading through the pages, but it is also very helpful to have the microfilms available to you at the StLGS office where you can take your time to search manually. If you can’t make it to our office, some of the same microfilms are found at St. Louis Public Library’s Central or Compton locations.”

Another advantage of paying us a visit is that there are usually volunteers on hand who can help you read German or French. We might be able to provide you with other research materials, and, almost always, someone can assist you with ideas for your next research steps. 

The StLGS Office is Open!

As a reminder, our office is open to the public on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings from 9 a.m. until noon. If you think you will need assistance in reading either French or German, you might want to call ahead (314-647-8547) during office hours to be sure a volunteer who can help you will be in the office when you arrive. Also, until the COVID pandemic is no longer a health threat, we are asking that all guests wear masks while in the office.

(Many thanks to Carol Whitton for providing information and writing most of this post.)