This post is to provide information on how to search the Boston Evening Transcript pages online. This was historically a very important source of genealogical information on New England families.
From 1906 to 1941, the Transcript furnished an very early version of G2G -- people posted questions and others answered. The information was often not sourced, and sometimes wrong, but it can still be useful or even essential. If you're like me, and started researching your tree only long after the research had moved to Web, you might also like me have not learned about the Transcript untile long after starting your genealogical journey.
Images of the newspaper through 1915 are available through Google News Archives:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=sArNgO4T4MoC
Images from 1911 through 1940 are available with a subscription to the New England Historic Genealogical Society through the "Boston Evening Transcript: Genealogy Pages" database at AmericanAncestors.
But these pages are not indexed at either website, making it harder to find what you want. The pages were indexed in the old American Genealogical-Biographical Index (AGBI). To search this, AFAIK, you need to use Ancestry.com, although your library might have a subscription if you don't have your own. (Family Search has AGBI volumes, but when I look I don't see references to the Transcript -- maybe someone can explain to me why this version is different than Ancestry's.)
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/3599/
So search this Ancestry link for your person. If it mentions the Boston Evening Transcript, then if it is before 1815 go to Google News or if it is after 1811 you need American Ancestors. The AGBI will give you the date of the newspaper you need, and then you can search for the prompt number within that paper -- usually in the back half of the paper if you are using Google News.
Happy hunting!
