52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy - Week 2

Week 2 – Paid Online Genealogy Tools: Which paid genealogy tool do you appreciate the most? What special features put it at the top of your list? How can it help others with their genealogy research?
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I offer this caveat first, there is no such thing as a perfect site or index. Each of these sites has valuable information that I can't easily access in any other way, that is why I pay for these subscriptions.

Ancestry.com: a blessing and a curse. A blessing when the search engine actually works that same way twice, a curse when the search engine won't locate something when I just looked at it!

GenealogyBank.com: My go-to newspaper site. Their collection is growing; there are thousands of newspapers yet to be scanned and OCRd (optical character resolution). But, it's still a very valuable resource for my work.

Southern California Genealogical Society: Being a member of this society (I live in Oregon by the way) allows me an affordable access to NewspaperArchive.com.

Non-paid: I just have to throw these in as they too are invaluable, and because I. LOVE. old. newspapers. I love new newspapers too! Newspapers are a tool I use in my work and I'm always looking for ways to access more of them.

Library of Congress (LOC) newspapers 1836-1922: See if your state of interest has had any scanning done yet.

And at the LOC site is the link for the U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690 to date, by state. Here you can see all newspaper titles for each state, town name. Can be most helpful when you want to check to see if a particular community had a newspaper.