Newspaper Navigator Profile – Zelda Sears

The Library of Congress launched a new version of the Newspaper Navigator on September 15, 2020. The Newspaper Navigator is a next-generation Cognitive Search indexer containing over 1.5 million newspaper photos with associated captions. Images are recognized, objects detected, captioned, and searched by visual similarity.

Inspired by Beyond Words, a crowdsourced way of detecting and captioning images in historical newspapers, Benjamin Lee and his team trained models on over 16 million supervised images and OCR-corrected text.

Ray Sears has curated a few images and text from the collection, including Zelda Sears.

Zelda Sears

Miss Zelda Sears with Black Cat
Miss Zelda Sears

Zelda Sears, (January 21, 1873 – February 19, 1935). She was born as Zelda Paldi near Brockway Township, St. Clair County, Michigan, into a multi-lingual family that spoke FrenchItalian and English. Her father, Justin Lewis Paldi, was a first-generation Italian immigrant engineer and horse breeder, and her mother Roxa Tyler was of English heritage.

She married Herbert E. Sears 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelda_Sears

Washington Times 15 Apr 1909 p. 11

Miss Zelda Sears, Gained Her First Insight Into Theatrical Matters in Newspaper Work. Zelda Sears, who is now the society “busybody” in “The Truant,” at the Belasco with Miss Mary Mannering, was a newspaper woman before she went on the stage. Her insight into things theatrical was gained during many years of experience as dramatic critic on Chicago papers. Miss Sears is still an enthusiast on the subject of newspaper work, but she likes still more the profession which  she is now following.

Los Angeles Herald, January 17, 1909, Page 4

Zelda Sears (1873-1935) was an American actress, screenwriter, novelist and businesswoman. By age 12, she was working as a salesgirl. Sears was eventually hired to contribute pieces to the Port Huron newspaper by the managing editor. Leaving Port Huron at the age of 17, she journeyed to Chicago. Sears became fascinated with Sarah Bernhardt who was performing in Chicago. She observed the famous actress and was able to obtain an interview on one occasion. Later she joined the acting troupe of John Stapleton. Her first meaningful part came by way of Harry Parker, who was general manager for William A. Brady. Sears’ stage career was further boosted by her acting in a production of “Lovers Lane”. Other plays in which she appeared were “Women and Wine”, “The Blue Mouse”, “Keeping Up Appearances”, “The Nest Egg”, “The Scarlet Woman”, and “Undertow”. She came to Hollywood to be a scenarist for Cecil B. DeMille and MGM in the early 1930s, and went on to have roles as screenwriter and actress in multiple films. – (from historyforsale.com)

https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search?select_state=All&select_start_year=1900&select_end_year=1963&search=zelda+sears&plus_library=259529&minus_library=&positive=&negative=&facet_names=&facet_index=&selected_facets=&view=gallery&date_ascending=&start_time=1600394597298

From the Library of Congress, Newspaper Navigator Dataset: Extracted Visual Content from Chronicling America

Beyond Words

http://beyondwords.labs.loc.gov/#/

Newspaper Navigator

https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search

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