Uncovering Family Histories in the Online Collections from OurDigitalWorld – Walter Lewis
Discover the digital collections that make up some of the largest freely accessible Ontario history resources! These collections bring local history from across the province online, and include photos, oral histories, vital statistics indexing and full run community newspapers.
Searching community led online collections means navigating many variations in full text access, indexing, and more. So how do you find your best results? Using the OurDigitalWorld search portals, we’ll explore how to search and discover family history and how to navigate the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to searching digitized newspapers.
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Walter Lewis
Walter Lewis has over 35 years of experience with newspaper research, both historical and genealogical, and at some point or other has read all the surviving issues of the Upper Canadian newspapers to 1838. With Rick Neilson, he is the co-author of the _River Palace_, the story of the Lake Ontario/St. Lawrence River steamboat _Kingston_, the research for which also led him to take up scuba diving.
Beyond that he is the lead developer for OurDigitalWorld.org, which has been working with a variety of organizations to get a variety of cultural resources online, including large volumes of digitized newspaper pages. Walter can usually be found no more than a click away from from the website he maintains, MaritimeHistoryOfTheGreatLakes.ca, when he isn’t speaking in a variety of venues, both library, historical or, on occasion, a Great Lakes cruise ship.
