More and more historical newspapers are being scanned, indexed and made available for online searching, says Barbara Renick, making them more useful as tools for genealogical and family history research.

"However, searching computer-generated indices is very different than other types of online searches," said Sister Renick, an author and frequent lecturer at national genealogical conferences. Hers was one of 135 presentations at the Conference on Family History and Genealogy at BYU, a four-day gathering that concludes Friday.

"Online newspaper indexes and images are a lot like the dandelion seeds," she said. "They show up anywhere and everywhere on the Internet, and tracking down where they are, catching them and making use of them is very difficult."

Some difficulties arise from the fact that they are computer-generated indexes, she said. "There is some reason for the difficulties, with the quality of the newspaper that is used, the software that is used, etc."

Searches often return too many matches, and fuzzy results, making it necessary for a researcher to work harder to fine-tune a search. The rewards, however, often come from the advantage of being able to cover literally millions of articles from thousands of newspapers, often with surprising results, Sister Renick said.

In a syllabus accompanying her lecture, she noted that most newspapers today have Web sites that contain archives of back issues and are searchable, but few have the entire run, including issues published before electronic publishing came into being. Thus, her lecture focused on commercial genealogy sites, commercial information sites, free genealogy sites and international newspaper resources on line.

Information about those sites can be found on her Web page, www.zroots.com/newspapers.htm.

The drawbacks to searching newspaper online — the "fuzzy" results — can be overcome by using search strategies, Sister Renick said, such as using different combinations of search terms.

"Mix and match them, play with combinations, and see what she get," she suggested. "Even for a name where the search does find matches, often it finds too many matches. So go in with a geographic focus, go in with a time period, and key words. You may want to add an occupation. Was he a miller? Was he a Baptist preacher?" Organizations to which the person belonged might be another possibility for a search combination, she said, "or an event, one that you know he participated in."

One can also mix in associated surnames with or without those other identifiers, she noted. A marriage might be the source of such an associated surname.

rscott@desnews.com