Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Resources for Wrestling Research

[This post will be a work-in-progress, and will change as I become aware of new resources.]
 
    A good place to start when researching a wrestler, promotion, or other related subject are newspaper archives.  Every day hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of old newspapers are being digitized, made searchable through OCR (optical character recognition) technology and released to the web.  Some such resources are free to the public, some are provided as commercial products.  Some of those commercial options are available through agreements with local public library systems, and so are effectively free for patrons.  For most of the following, I will just be using the term 'wrestler' to include anyone associated with the business be they actual wrestlers, referees, managers or promoters, just to save time.

Aside from just articles, ads and results for wrestling shows, newspapers also bring us news of accidents, deaths and obituaries, weddings, and often retrospective articles when a retired wrestler becomes something of a local icon.

Newspapers (free)
ChroniclingAmerica.log.gov is a newspaper digitization program headed by the United States Library of Congress, and has a goal to digitize all available newspapers that are in the public domain.  That means the content is largely pre-1926.  Through a partnership with Newspapers.com, a lot of the papers on Chronicling America are also available through the paid service, which boosts Newspapers.com's catalog but also allows for a much smoother user interface than what the LOC currently offers.  This program is mostly executed by various state archives and university libraries, where they can receive government grants to digitize their newspaper collections and provide them to the Library of Congress to host on the Chronicling America site.

The Google Newspaper Archive (news.google.com/newspapers) is one of a long line of semi-abandoned Google experiments.  Back when they were binge-scanning every book they could get their hands on, they also began digitizing newspapers, new and old.  They also briefly bought out a website called PaperofRecord.com that happened to have the largest collection of Mexican newspapers on the web.  Sadly, since Google was not able to work out an agreement with the Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de Mexico that had provided the Mexican papers, all of that content was removed from Google's site and, even once PaperofRecord.com was sold to another party, the Mexican papers were never restored and now remain mostly inaccessible outside of Mexico.

Mexican papers aside, the Google Newspaper Archive is still online and while the search facility is mostly useless the papers are still there and can be browsed directly.  The best search interface for this archive is through their Google Books interface, where you can restrict your searches to certain types of media, newspapers being an option.  While many titles have now been removed, this collection still includes many titles that are available nowhere else, as yet.  So it still a valuable, though tedious, resource for historical newspaper research.

Back to Mexico, there are a few newspapers that are free to search and read on the site for the Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de Mexico (http://www.hndm.unam.mx/), namely El Informador, the main newspaper of Guadalajara.

Elephind.com is a sort of meta search engine that attempts to provide a single search interface for several of the various independent newspaper digitization sites across the world.

Newspapers (subscription)

Newspapers.com is a now subsidiary of Ancestry.com and is available through paid subscription.  They probably have the largest catalog with the best user interface of the available commercial options, and are constantly adding new titles and pages to their offerings.

GenealogyBank.com is a subsidiary of Newsbank.com, and as the title implies, is geared more directly toward genealogical research, but still have an impressive catalog of newspapers in their archive.  For the most part, there is not a lot of overlap with the titles offered at Newspapers.com, so a subscription to both, for those who could afford it, would be very useful.  Their monthly blog usually lists the latest additions to their records: https://blog.genealogybank.com/

NewspaperArchive.com has probably the smallest collection of the paid sites, and due to poor management, squandered their early lead in the field.  They also racked up a lot of bad user sentiment with questionable billing practices and poor site performance.  While those days are largely past, the company as it stands now is having to recover a lot of lost ground.  Site performance is much improved. They are picking up steam as far as adding new content, see here for recent additions: https://newspaperarchive.com/search/publication/.  For what they offer, they are also the most expensive of the three sites, but still, the do offer papers not covered by either Newspapers.com or GenealogyBank.com


Genealogy Resources

While genealogy sites might not immediately seem relevant to wrestling research, remember that family history research is largely just searching for information on specific people.  And wrestlers are certainly specific people!  Sites along these lines are perfect for fleshing out personal details about a wrestler's whereabouts at various points in their lives, before, during and after their wrestling careers.  Sometimes tracking them down requires working from a different angle, such as finding a sibling or child and working back toward your main subject.  Often you can reconstruct a part of their family tree and find living family members to talk to, who sometimes are only too happy to talk about their long departed loved ones.

Free sites:
FamilySearch.org is the primary genealogy website maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  The Mormons' enthusiasm for family history is a benefit for everyone due to the sheer volume of information they are constantly making available.  The site contains census records (see where the wrestlers were born, where they lived, family members, etc.), immigration records (mostly ships passenger lists), city directories (sort of the precursor to phone books), vital records (birth, marriage, divorce and death records) and a variety of other records both civilian and military.

FindAGrave.com is another good resource, not just to locate the final resting place of a wrestler, but also possibly connections to family.  Especially in the case of wrestlers long deceased, often it is through family that we might be able to find more about a wrestler.  I have set up a virtual cemetery there of people involved in the wrestling business here:  

https://www.findagrave.com/virtual-cemetery/741141

Currently, I have found the final resting places for over 1100 wrestlers, promoters, managers, announcers and referees.

Facebook.com.  Seriously!  If you have managed to find any surviving relatives through any of the resources listed above (in obituaries or as virtual flowers left on Find A Grave), if you want to get in touch, search for them on Facebook.  I have found more than a few family members and descendants of wrestlers on Facebook.  The most difficult part is then getting them to respond, and hopefully being interested enough to help.

The National Archives of Australia (https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au) has been a surprisingly good resource for travel records.  The have an extensive and growing database of passenger records, both for ships and early air travel, that I have used to place several wrestlers, and a couple with their real names.  That's where I found Ricky Waldo's real name, browsing through their passenger arrival records for wrestlers.

Subscription sites:

Fold3.com is primarily an archive of military records, though they do also have some census records, immigration records and city directories.  I have had a lot of success finding wrestlers from the 1910s-1950s in the World War I and World War II draft registrations.  Those draft records typically include a full name, date and place of birth, and current residence.  The WWII records also include employment information, height, weight, hair color, skin color, other distinguishing features (cauliflower ears!) and a copy of the wrestlers' signature.

Ancestry.com, naturally, is a great resource, but can be a bit pricy.  Though, much like the newspaper sites, when you are doing a lot of serious research, what you save in travel expenses more than makes up for the yearly fees involved, and there are bundles that include Fold3 and Newspapers.com that can make it more of a bargain.

e-Yearbook.com is a bit tangential, but when researching the early days of someone's life, being able to find them in a high school or college yearbook is a great way to verify the name you are hunting down is the actual person once you see a photo and see the various activities they were involved with in school.