Vital records via newspaper

Last weekend the Youngstown Vindicator wrote up DeWayne McCarty's new compilation, Newspaper Abstracts From the Villages of Columbiana and East Lewistown, Ohio: ten years of work, 656 pages, covering births, marriages, and deaths in area small towns from 1870 to 1902.

If you're new to this, be sure to use these abstracts as a guide to finding the actual newspaper stories -- both to guard against error and to find additional material that may lurk in the original.

If you're old to this, you may have wondered if good traditional genealogical work of this kind is about to be superseded by some universal every-word-searchable digitized version of every newspaper that ever existed. I'm told by those who should know that it won't be, not any time soon. Thanks for keeping the faith, Mr. McCarty.