Researching Your Leadville House

A great place to start researching is on the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection website  - coloradohistoricnewspapers.org. Within this collection there are eight Lake County/Leadville newspapers ranging from 1879-1926. This collection is searchable, so you can type in your address, names of people, or names of businesses and the results will highlight where the search term appears in the context of the newspaper.

Here is an example of a search in the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection website, using the 318 West Fourth Street address.

Using the search feature, you can type in the address of the house you are researching. You may want to limit search by county or city, as that will narrow the results to our area. In this example, we have chosen to limit by county. As you may notice in the third result above, the optical recognition sometimes has trouble differentiating letters and numbers in the fonts used in print at the time, so you will want to keep a close eye to make sure the article or advertisement does in fact contain the address you are researching.

When you click on a title link, such as number one "UNKNOWN [ARTICLE]", it will bring up where that article appears in the context of the newspaper. See below.

You can zoom in to view the article better. If you would like to print the article, you can do so by right-clicking on it and selecting 'Clip this article.' You can then print using your browser's print option.

Another helpful function is the Boolean search, which allows you to search all of your words, any of your words, and exact phrase. In our first example we were using all of your words, which returned 443 results. In our example above, we used 'Exact phrase' and nine results were returned (though as you can see the optical recognition is still having trouble).

These results give us some names of people that lived at 318 West Fourth St. in Leadville. We can search these names in the newspapers to see if any other information pops up. We can also search these names in the city directories and other sources.

Names from the search results:

C. H. Livingston - 1884

Charles Dennison - 1888 - was moving in after Clarence Hersey

Mrs. M. Schneider - 1900

Jeremiah Joseph Dooley - 1918

• Try different spelling variations and abbreviations - 318 West Fourth, 318 W. 4th, 318 W. Fourth, etc.
  • This goes for names, too - Charles/Chas, Thomas/Thos, Murray/Murry, etc
• The optical recognition software has trouble with the fonts used in some of the newspapers - double check in the search results that you are looking at the right address.
• Use 'limit search by county' or 'limit search by city' to select Lake County or Leadville - this way you are searching the right place!
• The Boolean Search options can be quite helpful, particularly 'exact phrase'
• Don't forget to write down names that you find while searching - this will help you research in other resources.