Baptist History and Newspaper Research

This morning I posted on my blog Discovering Baptist History through Newspaper Research, an essay on using newspaper research to fill in missing pieces of our Baptist history. Any thoughts on the subject -- comments, criticisms, questions -- will be welcomed.

Have any of you used this method?

 

So has no one ever tried any of this? Would love to compare notes!

One simple use of the newspaper research -- nothing grand or earth-shattering -- is to rebuild a record of meetings of an association that has been lost. For example, if the minutes of XYZ Baptist Association were not preserved and lost for the years of 1899-1912, we might be able to find a newspaper in the area that carried announcements about the association meetings (when and where) and recover that bit of information for the historical record. That might not interest too many people, but some of us historical wackos thrive on such.