What is here for genealogists?

As the Richmond newspaper with the largest circulation, the Daily Dispatch contained a variety of information that may be useful to genealogists and family historians. From death and marriage notices to casualty lists (see example here), the newspaper contains a wealth of information concerning individuals and soldiers. Lists of individuals having unclaimed letters for them at the Post Office are included in each Saturday issue of the newspaper, usually broken up into a "Ladies' List" and a "Gentlemen's List." These lists are most often not searchable through any of the search forms - the page images of the Saturday papers must be viewed to see them. For an example of one of the lists, see this section of the 3 November, 1860 issue.

Personal names

As was common during the 19th century, the Daily Dispatch often used abbreviations for common given names when mentioning individuals. These abbreviations are not as yet standardized throughout the text into their long forms; thus, a search for "william garvey" will not yeild any results, but a search for "wm garvey" will. When searching for individuals with common given names be sure to try the abbreviated form in addition to the long form of the given name. For a detailed list of given name abbreviations, see this list

Another suggestion for finding individuals noted in the paper is to use the Proximity search option. Try inserting the given name and the surname in different search boxes followed by one of the "<" options, which indicates the number of characters the two words may be separated by. See Fig. 1 for an example.

Fig. 1: Proximity searching for individuals.

Finally, the "personal name" search limiter may be used to focus searches, but remember that not all personal names are correctly identified within the text. See the help guide for using search limiters for more detailed information.

Death and marriage notices

In the Richmond Dispatch, death and marriage notices were printed under the headings "Died" and "Married," respectively. The easiest way to find these is by using the death notice or marriage notice search limiters as described here. The term "obituary" is occasionally used - it appears to be more associated with death notices of more reknowned individuals, or those that have article-length statements attached. See this example. We cannont guarantee that all of these sections have been properly marked within the text, however, so it may be of some use to browse the collection for the date of the event, if known. Death notices, in particular, were not printed on the day the individual died; if you have an idea of when the death took place, try browsing through several papers immediately after that date.

Birth announcements did not appear in a specific section of the newspaper, and usually no birth announcements were printed at all. Mentions of children being born may, however, be found by way of regular searching, but these are in no way an authoritative listing of all births in and around Richmond.