Dear genealogy friends,
I've just had the most interesting experience. I was tooling around
ProQuest, trying to decide if I should join the Godfrey Library for
access to ProQuest. I was looking to see if they had The Baltimore Sun
indexed and available as images back to 1837. I found some info that
looked to me like they are starting to archive current copies of the
newspaper, but that they do not have it in their historical newspaper
list. I wrote an email to them on their "contact us" page to confirm
this. In just a week or so, I received a reply from Brett at ProQuest
telling me that I had surmised correctly but that ProQuest is just
starting to think about The Sun for its next historical newspaper
project and could I tell him what I feel to be the historical value of
The Sun. ME! He wanted to know MY opinion about The Sun - a pure
amateur genealogist! I was floored. I was even more floored when he
wrote back again and told me that his publisher, Marta, wanted to speak
to me on the phone about the historical value of The Sun. WOW!! My
opinion counts for something!!!
Anyway, I've just gotten off the phone with Marta and she is interested
in talking to more people about The Sun to try to make a determination
about its value as their next project. Since she's already talked to me
(the amateur), she's now interested in talking to people who are
connected to and/or in charge of historical societies, genealogical
societies, and libraries in Baltimore and Maryland and has asked me to
find some of those people and give them her number. So, if you are one
of these people, please write to me privately and let me know so that I
can give you her number. I don't want to cause her to have a ridiculous
mess of phone calls, so I'm not going to post her phone number publicly
on the list.
Having The Sun fully searchable online would be a HUGE boon to our
genealogical research. Hooray!!
Christine Schott