Old Fulton NY WebSite Search Help (2024)

Old Fulton NY Post Card Website

New York State Historical Photos & Newspapers 1795 Thru 2007 More Data Is Added Every Sunday Night!

If you wish to see an Index of the Newspapers displayed on this site, or wish to browse the different papers, click Here. Please note, this link will just show Newspapers and not other Documents.
RULES OF THE HOUSE:
I.) Use of Programs like Web Devil, SiteGrabber, OfflineExployer or any other mass downloading software programs will get you banned from this site. Server logs are read each morning and my software will detect this type of activity. Violators will be automatically prohibited from entering this site, I do Not have the bandwidth to support this kind of activity and serve the people who wish to use this site as it was intended.
II.) This site is FREE. All I request is a smile and a little courtesy. If you have a reasonable need for something on this site, and you will not use it for commercial purposes (Make Someone Pay For it), I will give it to you. Just e-mail me with a description of your needs at tryniski@fultonhistory.com
A little about WWW.fultonhistory.com and what you will find on this website
This website is a searchable repository of many of the old Newspapers published in New York State. The old Newspapers found on this site has have been scanned by production grade Wicks and Wilson Microfilm scanners which, in the authors opinion, are the finest available. The microfilm for this site was obtained from the State of New York Newspaper Project (1970s early 1980’s) and/or from libraries, historical societies, or private individuals who wanted to share what they had.
A number of microfilm companies filmed the old newspapers for the Newspaper Project. Some of the filming was of very poor quality newsprint (faded, torn, creased, excessive ink bleed) so that an acceptable image (for OCR) was next to impossible to obtain. The results are a perfect example of WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get.
To make this process even more interesting, microfilm comes in three (3) generations. The First Generation consists of Master Negative or originals. The Second Generation is the Print Master Negative which is made from the Master Negative. The Third Generation, or Service Copy positive, is made from the Print Master Negative. Each time you go down a generation, you lose image quality. This website almost always gets 3rd generation Microfilm (also called Service copy positive), or, as I call it, “bottom of the barrel” microfilm. This generation of film has been used many times at the various libraries and has a good deal of wear, tear, rips, scratches, dirt and splices. Despite these imperfections, remarkable technologies have been developed [word recognition, aka OCR software] which extract acceptable images to text from this very poor source material (remember some of the Newspaper pages go back to the early 1800’s ). Not withstanding the marvels of this technology, it cannot find or correct what is not there. As a result, although most pages are legible, some, regrettably, are not.
Old Fulton NY Post Cards has reviewed many Word Recognition programs and has selected the best in this group to perform the OCR on the images hosted on this site. Original scanned images are archived off site at very high resolution (now over 120 terabytes of compressed data). As technology advances, we will be able to re-apply these advances to our stored images thereby enhancing the future accuracy of word recognition in our existing data base.
Due to the inherent shortcoming of OCR, www.fultonhistory.com urges all users of this site to learn and use one, or all, of the following options to maximize data identification and retrieval from these old newspapers.

A Note Concerning this Archive.

I hve been asked from time to time to remove or change certain information in the Archives of this site that a viewer considered embarrassing to them or could cause repercussions to them. Archives held on this web site are met to preserve public records of times past in its ORIGINAL CONTIENT, making changes to or modifying this content would be contrary to the purpose of an archive. I'm sure you would agree if you went to your library and started to read a book only to find the book had many lines delegated or blanked out would make that book useless for what is original purpose was.

Q. How can I support this initiative?
You may use this link to send your Contrubitions

If you are a non-profit organization which has microfilm of any New York State Newspaper or other N.Y. Historical Documents which you would like to have converted to digital format and OCR'd for your non-profit use, and you would allow this site to share a copy of it so all could enjoy, I would consider doing it at no charge. Contact me at tryniski@fultonhistory.com
Q. Can I put a link on my site to yours?
A. Yes. But PLEASE, use ONLY www.fultonhistory.com / Other pages and links change as updates occur.

TIPS & SOLUTIONS

Fuzzy Searching

Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. For example, a fuzzy search for apple will find appple. Fuzzy searching can be useful when you are searching text that may contain typographical errors, or for text that has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR). There are two ways to add fuzziness to searches:

1. Check the "Fuzzy searching" box to enable fuzziness for all of the words in your search request. You can adjust the level of fuzziness from 1 to 10.
2. You can also add fuzziness selectively using the % character. The number of % characters you add determines the number of differences Old Fulton NY Search will ignore when searching for a word. The position of the % characters determines how many letters at the start of the word have to match exactly. Examples:

• ba%nana Word must begin with ba and have at most one difference between it and banana.
• b%%anana Word must begin with b and have at most two differences between it and banana.

Q. How can I just search one newspaper issue instead of the hundreds that are here? I'm getting way to many hits.
A. Solution - The newspaper titles are also indexed. Use this command.... Filename contains and The title of the Paper or part of the title of the paper in the search window along with what you are searching for (you must know how the Newspaper title was entered when I scanned it... look in the index to see the way it is displayed...).

Here is a sample Using The Boolean search type I want to search just the Newspapers from Buffalo NY for a murder trial and a person called perraton and I know it happened some time in the late 1920s or early 1930s "murder trial" and "perraton" and (Filename contains (Buffalo NY)) and (Filename Contains (1927~~1934))

Here is an example on how to search on one specific newspaper title( I will use Syracuse NY Post Standard in this example) for a range of dates (I will use 1904 through 1920) for a person named john Green and you not sure if he was using a middle initial........ First change to a Boolean search type then enter the following in the search box (ignore the quotes) “Syracuse NY Post Standard 1904~~1920 and john w/1 Green”
The words you have written is your instruction to the search engine to find only the newspapers that have the title Syracuse NY Post Standard and only the years 1904 (the ~~ [tilde symbol] means range of dates) through1920 and with the word john and within 1 character of the word Green ...
Boolean searching is very powerful but you must spend the time and learn how to use it. You will find a comprehensive guide for Boolean searches later in this section.

Q. How can I bring up the next page of the newspaper I am viewing or get to a page that that a Story is continued on or how to put the whole newspaper in page number order?

A. Solution....Redo the search by inputting the original newspapers name but changing the numeral digit by 1 to see the next page on that issue. Example - Newspaper Oswego Valley News 1962 1005.pdf change to Newspaper Oswego Valley News 1962 1006.pdf
Click here to see a video on how to do it
Q. How can I print only the part of the newspaper page that I want?
A. To select a portion of a Pdf to print, in Adobe® Reader® 4.0 or later, use the graphics select tool:
-- In Adobe® Reader® 5 +, the graphics select tool has its own button on the toolbar. (it looks like a box with a dotted line)
-- In Adobe® Reader® 4.x, the graphics select tool shares space on the toolbar with the text select tool. The text select tool is visible by default. To select the graphics select tool, you must click and hold on the text select tool. When you do so, Acrobat® Reader® displays a pop-up of the graphics select tool, which you can then select.
-- Using the graphics select tool, click and drag out a rectangle covering the area you'd like to print
-- Click the printer icon. Choose print range 'Selected Graphic'. This will print only the page area you selected before opening the Print dialog box.
In Reader® 5 + you may also want to tick expand small pages to paper size and/or shrink over-sized pages to paper size. Click OK.
Q. Can I make the newspaper page take up more of the screen?
A. Yes. The newspaper page is in a frame on the right of the screen and the search results are in a frame on the left of the screen. To increase the size of the newspaper frame, move your cursor slowly over the gray vertical line that separates the two frames until your cursor changes from a pointer to a horizontal arrow with two points. Then, hold down your left mouse button and drag the gray line to the left and release the mouse button. This will increase the size of the newspaper page. To restore the search results column, reverse the procedure.
Q. How can I search a newspaper title by date?
A. You can include a date as one of your search terms. For example, to search for snow in1912, enter the words "snow" and "1912" in the search box. There is a major exception to this rule. This search feature will only work if the year appears on the newspaper page. Many older newspapers did not print the date of the issue on each page.

Q. I did a search for a name that I know is in the paper but it did not come up. Why?
A. Indexing is done by searching for words in an image of the complete newspaper page. This is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. OCR is not a perfect process even with very good originals. When the originals are discolored or contain broken type, the results are less favorable. If the OCR program was not able to identify a word, it will not appear in the index. Remember, OCR is like looking for a word through a piece of glass. If the glass is discolored, broken or dirty, you may not be able to discern the word even though the word was on the original.
Q. Why do the photographs look so "washed out?"
A. The images were created as black and white bi-tonal images. This type of image is great for text but not so good for pictures. If you require a better copy of a picture, a grayscale image can be created if I still have the microfilm in my possession. As of 3-01-2006 All images are now scanned in 8 bit grayscale which will give a much better image.
Q. May I suggest titles to be added to this site?
A. Yes, as long as the title was published in New York State and was not copyrighted. Click here to see how to check if a Newspaper was copyrighted. Use the Email address on the "email me" at the Top of Search Bar of this web site to suggest which Newspaper you would like added.

Problem - Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9 Acrobat 10 Compatibility Issues

Problems & Solutions

PDF files appear normally but without hit highlighting (Adobe Acrobat/Reader X)

Please follow this link and download and install this plugin to have hithighliting in this new version Of Acrobat Hit Highlighter for Acrobat 10

Solution- A work around is right click on the blue hiperlink and choose save target from the drop down menu and save to you desktop.

Problem - Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9 Compatibility Issues

Solution - Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9 have a new setting that disables hit highlighting in Pdf files by default. To change this setting in Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat 9, click Edit > Preferences > Search, and check the box to "Enable search highlights from external highlight server".

Problem – Your web pages are all garbled or gibberish and I can't make heads or tails out of them ! What’s wrong?

Solution - Starting November 21, 2006, I have implemented HTTP COMPRESSION. As a result, I have seen a 66% reduction on html page size (and more and more sites will adopt to this process in the future) on the web pages my server sends you. This will reduce my bandwidth and speed up the opening the pages on your end. Some OLD BROWSERS CANNOT DECOMPRESS compressed HTTP pages and will give you Gibberish junk. PLEASE, update to a more current browser which will support HTTP COMPRESSION.

Problem - I like to listen to The Old Time Radio that you play but when I do a Search and display the document, I cannot hear The Old Time Radio.

Solution - If you are using Internet Explorer 7.0 (and maybe Firefox), just hold the CTL key Down when you double click the link and this will open a new window and leave the Old Time Radio Playing.

Problem-- Error message says Old Fulton NY Search Engine Unable to Process Request. Now What?

You may also see a message :Unable to process request. Encrypted paths were enabled in the options.html file and an unencrypted path was included in the request.
Solution -To correct this problem, generate a new search form. Replace the paths in your existing form with encrypted paths, or, disable the option setting to enable encrypted paths (this setting is in your Old Fulton NY Search _options.html file).

This problem is generally caused by your firewall. Disable it and try search again!

Problem--Acrobat was unable to open file or Acrobat says File is Corrupt or Acrobat Says Insufficient data for Image.

Solution - Starting May 1, 2006, all Pdf Files served here are being Recompressed with a more efficient Compression Algorithm (JBIG2) and will only decompress with Acrobat 6.0 or Higher. Due to the volume of Pdf files, this process may take up to 6 months or longer to complete. Recompression was necessary to reduce my upload bandwidth and to speed the opening of Pdf files on your end. So........ bottom line is.... upgrade to the Highest version of Acrobat Reader available so you can open these more efficient Pdf files.

Problem -The search works fine but when I double click on the link to open the Pdf file, the page just come up BLANK .

Solution - This is a problem with Acrobat. Please do the following. Press the CTL, the ALT, and the DEL keys on your keyboard at the same time. This will bring up the TASK MANAGER. Look for acrobat.exe running in the window. Highlight it. Then select END Process. Now try your search again. Or, if this is to confusing, reboot your computer and this will fix it.

Problem -Why do searches and/or the down loading of documents take so long? Is it your system or mine that is slow?

Solution -If you are on a Dial-up connection, it’s most likely you. The data domiciled on this site tends to be around 300 to 1,700 kilobits in average size which is best served by a broadband (adsl,dsl,cable) connection. If you are on a broadband connection, then chances are it’s me. When you look under the hood, our server is running a 4 core Intel Core7 with 24 Gig of Memory on a Windows 2008r2 server 64 bit edition operating system. Normally that’s enough to quickly serve your needs, but, this server is also pulling double duty,Not only is it processing your requests, but it is also OCR-ing the documents that will posted in the future. The CPUs on this server run saturated 100% usage 24/7 days a week. Optical Charter Recognition is very CPU Intensive and Running Flat out.

Problem - Sometimes I get a timeout message from my browser when I try to connect to your site or the search page comes up blank. Why? What should I do?
Solution – Lets try the most obvious first.

This site is often is very heavily used. It’s just like rush hour traffic. When there is not enough road for all the cars, traffic slows down. Sometimes it stops. To avoid rush hour, here or on the highway, try again later, or late at night, when there are fewer visitors to the site. I have limited upload bandwidth, even though ISP's advertise very high download bandwith they don't tell you if you connect to a website that only has a 1.5 Mb up load then that all you will get and that has to be shared with all others that use this site, Upload bandwidth continues to be our most biggest issue as fare as serving more people faster.

Or, the Second Alternate Solution
Norton Internet Security Suite also will cause this type of problem You will have better results by configuring the privacy panel to allow www.fultonhistory.com.
Or, the Third (and most technical) Solution
This is often caused by a router on the network that is not allowing you through to my site. Here is what I suggest. Go to the cmd prompt (start>run>cmd) then type tracert www.fultonhistory.com. This will return a list of hops through the network (internet) with a time in milliseconds to get to each hop. Look at which hop you are timing out on, then call your ISP and tell them you are timing out at that hop and have them look at it from their end. Also, E-mail me (tryniski@fultonhistory.com) with a copy of your trace so I may look at it. It Will look Something Like THIS

Problem - I find it hard to read some of the type on the newspapers? What can I do to improve the legibility of the newspaper print?
Solution - Use the Zoom tool in Acrobat to Zoom to 150 %. All newspapers pages on this site, with the exception of a few issues, are optimized to be viewed at that magnification level.
Problem - Some of my searches should produce a very large return but I only get 5000 records. Why don’t I get a complete return of every record?
Solution - I have “hard coded” 5000 as a maximum number of return records on a given search request. In addition to being a drain on systems resources, no one is going to page through 5000 records. Please use a more specific search request. We will both be happier.
Problem - I found an article on a newspaper page that had no date. How do I find the date of that article.
Solution....Redo the search using the original newspapers name but changing the numeral digit by 1 to see the next page on that issue... Example - Newspaper Oswego Valley News 1962 1005.pdf change to Newspaper Oswego Valley News 1962 1006.pdf . Keep doing this until a page comes up that has a date on it.

Click here to see a video on how to do it

Problem -I want to save a screen shot of my Desktop showing what I see so I can send to someone.

Solution Just press the key on your keyboard that says "Print Screen" this will capture you screen into your computers memory then right click on your Desktop and choose New/ Bitmap image then double click on that new bitmap image(you might get an error just disregard) then choose edit and choose paste then save it with a name of your choice.

SEARCHING MADE EASY

To search using Old Fulton NY Search Engine, enter a search request in the space provided and click the Search button.Old Fulton NY Search Engine will return a list of the documents that match your request. To view a document in the list, click on the link. After you have opened a document in Old Fulton NY Search Engine, you can use the Next Hit and Prev Hit buttons on the button bar to navigate from hit to hit. (For PDF files, use the hit navigation buttons in the Adobe Reader toolbar, not the Old Fulton NY Search Engine buttons.) Click here for more information.
The search form may include one or more checkboxes for search features.

Search Requests Overview

Old Fulton NY Search supports two types of search requests:
1.) NATURAL LANGUAGE SEARCH:
An any words or "natural language" search is any sequence of text such as a sentence or a question. An "any words" search is accomplished by placing quotation marks around phrases, or by placing + in front of any word or phrase that is required, or by placing a - in front of a word or phrase to exclude it. Examples:
banana pear "apple pie"
"apple pie" -salad +"ice cream"

2.) BOOLEAN SEARCH:
A Boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them. Examples:

If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).
Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.
Search terms may include the following special characters:

Words and Phrases

Use quotation marks to indicate a phrase. You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:
apple w/5 "fruit salad"
If a phrase contains a noise word, Old Fulton NY Search will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.
A Punctuation mark inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t. 1843(c)(8)(ii) would become 1843 c 8 ii (four words).

Wildcards (* and ?)

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:
appl* would match apple, application, etc.
*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.
appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.
ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.
Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow down searches somewhat.

Natural Language Searching

A natural language search request is any combination of words, phrases, or sentences. After a natural language search, Old Fulton NY Search sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words and search connectors such as NOT and OR are ignored.

Synonym Searching

Synonym searching finds synonyms of a word in a search request. For example, a search for fast would also find quick. You can enable synonym searching for all words in a request or you can enable synonym searching selectively by adding the & character after certain words in a request. Example: fast& w/5 search.
The effect of a synonym search depends on the type of synonym expansion requested on the search form. Old Fulton NY Search can expand synonyms using only user-defined synonym sets, using synonyms from Old Fulton NY Search 's built-in thesaurus, or using synonyms and related words (such as antonyms, related categories, etc.) from Old Fulton NY Search 's built-in thesaurus.

Phonic Searching

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for Smith will also find Smithe and Smythe.
To ask Old Fulton NY Search to search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Examples: #smith, #johnson
You can also check the Phonic searching box in the search form to enable phonic searching for all words in your search request. Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching and tends to make searches over-inclusive, so it is usually better to use the # symbol to do phonic searches selectively.

Stemming

Stemming extends a search to cover grammatical variations on a word. For example, a search for fish would also find fishing. A search for applied would also find applying, applies, and apply. There are two ways to add stemming to your searches:

1. Check the Stemming box in the search form to enable stemming for all of the words in your search request. Stemming does not slow searches noticeably and is almost always helpful in making sure you find what you want.
2. If you want to add stemming selectively, add a ~ at the end of words that you want stemmed in a search. Example: apply~

Variable Term Weighting

When Old Fulton NY Search sorts search results after a search, by default all words in a request count equally in counting hits. However, you can change this by specifying the relative weights for each term in your search request, like this:
apple:5 and pear:1
This request would retrieve the same documents as apple and pear but, Old Fulton NY Search would weight apple five times as heavily as pear when sorting the results.
In a natural language search, Old Fulton NY Search automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution in your documents. If you provide specific term weights in a natural language search, these weights will override the weights Old Fulton NY Search would otherwise assign.

Field Searching

When you index a database or other file containing fields, Old Fulton NY Search saves the field information so that you can perform searches limited to a particular field. For example, suppose that you indexed an Access database with a Name field and a Description field. You could search for apple in the Name field like this:
name contains apple
Field searches can be combined using and, or, and not, like this:
(City contains (Portland or Seattle)) and (Address contains (Washington))
The parenthesis are necessary to ensure that Old Fulton NY Search interprets the search request correctly.
Some file formats such as XML support nesting of fields. Example:
<record>
<name>John Smith</name>
<address>
<street>123 Oak Street</street>
<city>Middleton</city>
...
In Old Fulton NY Search, a search of a field includes any fields that are nested inside of the field, so the XML file above would be retrieved in a search for any of the following:
record contains oak
address contains oak
street contains oak
To specify a specific subfield of a field, use / to separate the field names, like this:
record/address contains oak
address/street contains oak
record/address/street contains oak
Put a / at the front of the field name to specify that it cannot be a sub-field of another field:
/record/name contains Smith
/name contains Smith
The second search request above would not match the XML example because, while it contains a "name" field, the name field is a sub-field of the record-field. A search for /name specifies a "name" field at the top of the field hierarchy.
Finally, you can use // to specify any number of unspecified intervening fields, like this:
/record//city contains Middleton

AND Connector

Use the AND connector in a search request to connect two expressions, both of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example:
apple pie and poached pear would retrieve any document that contained both phrases.
(apple or banana) and (pear w/5 grape) would retrieve any document that (1)contained either apple OR banana, AND (2)contained pear within 5 words of grape.

OR Connector

Use the OR connector in a search request to connect two expressions, at least one of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example, apple pie or poached pear would retrieve any document that contained apple pie, poached pear, or both.

W/N Connector

Use the W/N connector in a search request to specify that one word or phrase must occur within N words of the other. For example, apple w/5 pear would retrieve any document that contained apple within 5 words of pear. The following are examples of search requests using W/N:
(apple or pear) w/5 banana
(apple w/5 banana) w/10 pear
(apple and banana) w/10 pear
Some types of complex expressions using the W/N connector will produce ambiguous results and should not be used. The following are examples of ambiguous search requests:
(apple and banana) w/10 (pear and grape)
(apple w/10 banana) w/10 (pear and grape)
In general, at least one of the two expressions connected by W/N must be a single word or phrase or a group of words and phrases connected by OR. Example:
(apple and banana) w/10 (pear or grape)
(apple and banana) w/10 orange tree
Old Fulton NY Search uses two built in search words to mark the beginning and end of a file: xfirstword and xlastword. The terms are useful if you want to limit a search to the beginning or end of a file. For example, apple w/10 xlastword would search for apple within 10 words of the end of a document.

NOT and NOT W/N

Use NOT in front of any search expression to reverse its meaning. This allows you to exclude documents from a search. Example:
apple sauce and not pear
NOT standing alone can be the start of a search request. For example, not pear would retrieve all documents that did not contain pear.
If NOT is not the first connector in a request, you need to use either AND or OR with NOT:
apple or not pear
not (apple w/5 pear)
The NOT W/ ("not within") operator allows you to search for a word or phrase not in association with another word or phrase. Example:
apple not w/20 pear
Unlike the W/ operator, NOT W/ is not symmetrical. That is, apple not w/20 pear is not the same as pear not w/20 apple. In the apple not w/20 pear request, Old Fulton NY Search searches for apple and excludes cases where apple is too close to pear. In the pear not w/20 apple request, Old Fulton NY Search searches for pear and excludes cases where pear is too close to apple.

Numeric Range Searching

A numeric range search is a search for any numbers that fall within a range. To add a numeric range component to a search request, enter the upper and lower bounds of the search separated by ~~ like this:
apple w/5 12~~17
This request would find any document containing apple within 5 words of a number between 12 and 17.
Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).
For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers). Using alphabet customization, the interpretation of punctuation characters can be changed. For example, if you change the comma and period from space to ignore, then 123,456.78 would be interpreted as 12345678.