Newspapers can be a treasure trove of information about your ancestors. Unlike government records, which are often limited to forms, newspapers can typically include a wide variety of different types of information about the people who live in the towns and cities they serve. Newspapers often go beyond the facts to tell the stories about people’s lives.

If you’re just starting out looking for an ancestor in the newspaper, a common place to begin is with birth, marriage, and death announcements. Although the amount of information provided can vary widely, details you might find in these announcements include:

• Birth Announcements: baby’s name, birth date, gender, place of birth, parents’ names, family religion, grandparents’ names, mother’s maiden name, sibling names, photos

• Engagement/Wedding Announcements: wedding date and place, bride’s and groom’s names, parents’ names, family religion, members of the wedding party, guest list, name of minister, where the couple plans to live, description of bride’s dress, details of ceremony/reception/shower, photos

• Obituaries and Death Notices: death date and place, birth date and place, occupation/interests, military service, past places of residence, notable accomplishments, name and place of residence of close family, mortuary/cemetery, burial date, cause of death, photos

However, births, marriages, and deaths are just the beginning of the places in the newspaper where you might find your ancestors. The possibilities are nearly endless, but some sections in which you may want to look for your family include:

• Advertisements (business ads, personal ads)
• Church activities, news, and events
• Court dockets/jury lists
• Disaster victim lists
• Entertainment sections (local theater and performances, school/church productions)
• Gossip columns
• Land/home/farm sales
• Legal notices (divorces, probate, dissolution of business partnerships, sheriffs’ sales, delinquent tax lists, lawsuits, civil and criminal trials, foreclosures, estate settlements, bankruptcies, public sales/auctions)
• Letters to the editor
• Local election news/political events
• Military service information (enlistment, draft, injury/death, letters home)
• News stories (accidents/wrecks, disasters, crimes)
• Passenger lists (trains, ships)
• Personal notices
• Police blotters
• School news (honor roll, graduates, teachers)
• Social news and events (parties, club meetings, out-of-town visitors, hotel guests, community events, contests, holiday celebrations, vacations, fraternal organizations, reunions, anniversaries, memorials)
• Sports news (local teams, school sports, community leagues)
• Unclaimed letters lists

Get started looking for your ancestor’s by searching or browsing on Newspapers.com!

Did you know you can narrow your search by county on Newspapers.com?

Sometimes, limiting your search for your ancestors to just one paper or city may not return all the results you’re looking for, but widening your search to an entire state might return too many to easily sort through. So a county search can come in handy as a middle road between the two, since the results will come from the group of towns nearest where your ancestors lived.

County searches can also be helpful if the town where your ancestors lived didn’t have a newspaper (or if Newspapers.com doesn’t currently have the paper from a town you’re interested in), because it allows you to search papers from nearby towns—and since many papers carried news on residents of other towns within the county, you just might find your ancestor mentioned.

Searching within the papers of a specific county is easy.

1. On the homepage, type your search terms into the search box. Then select “Add more info.”
2. In the “Paper Location” box, start typing the name of the county you want to search within. As you type, a list of locations that match your search will automatically appear underneath. (If the county you type doesn’t appear on the list, then Newspapers.com doesn’t currently have any papers from that county.)
3. Select the county you’re interested in from the list, add a date or date range if you want, then select “Search.”

This will return matches for your search terms that are found within papers in the county you chose.

Another way to get search results from a specific geographic region is to search via the “See papers by location” page. Read more about how to do this here.

People often come to Newspapers.com looking for a specific newspaper title or for papers from a certain town where their ancestors lived. They want to know, “Is the paper I want on Newspapers.com?” If you fall into this category, read on to learn three ways you can find out if the papers you’re interested in are on our site.

Browse. If you’re interested in seeing papers for a particular city, Browse may be the most helpful method. To use Browse to find papers, first select “Browse” from the top of any page. This will take you to the Browse flow, where you can choose the country, state, and city you’re interested in viewing papers for. After you select a city, you’ll see a list of which papers for that city are on the site. You can browse even further to see which years, months, days, and pages we have for a given paper.

Papers page. If you want to search for a paper by name, the Papers page is the best place to do it. The Papers page is also helpful if you want to see papers from more than one state or from a particular time period(s). Like Browse, the Papers page can be accessed from the top of any page. Once on the Papers page, you can use the filters in the left-hand column to narrow down the displayed papers to those that fit your criteria. You can filter by paper name or keyword, date, or location—or by any combination of the three.

See papers by location. If you want to see what papers the site has for a geographic region (eastern Kansas, for example), “See papers by location” is the most convenient way to locate them. You’ll find a link to “See papers by location” on the homepage, which will take you to an interactive map. As you zoom in on an area or region, red pins representing newspapers will appear. Selecting a red pin will list all papers for the location. If Newspapers.com doesn’t currently have papers for a city you’re interested in, “See papers by location” is also useful for locating nearby towns with papers on the site.

Once you’ve used one of the above methods to narrow down to a paper (or group of papers) you’re interested in, you may wonder how to get started finding your ancestors within that specific paper. An easy way to begin is by searching, and each of the pages mentioned above provides you with a way to search only within the paper(s) you’ve chosen:

• From the “Browse“, once you’ve selected a paper, simply type your search terms into the “Search within” field directly above the browse flow. This will return results for only the paper you selected.




• From the “Papers” page, once you’ve filtered down to the paper(s) you want, enter your search into the “Search within these papers” box at the top right. Searching this way will return results for only those papers matching your filter criteria. .




• To search within papers you’ve found using “See papers by location,” enter your search into the search box labeled “Search within the area show below.” Doing so will return search results for all papers represented on screen by the red pins.

Many of us have—at some point in our lives—probably been sent a newspaper clipping that a friend or family member thought we’d enjoy. Or we’ve given a clipping to others ourselves. Now, on Newspapers.com, you can quickly and easily share your newspaper clippings online rather than dealing with cutting and sending paper copies, which can smear or fade over time.

It’s easy. Once you clip an article on Newspapers.com, the option will automatically appear for you to share that article via email or social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest—or you have the option to get the code to embed the article in your own website or blog. When you share a clipping in any of these ways, others can view it without having a Newspapers.com account.

If you want to share a Newspapers.com article that you’ve clipped previously, simply go to “Your Clippings” from the dropdown menu in the top right-hand corner of our website. Then either mouse over the clipping you want to share or click or tap it. Either will give you access to the “Share” button, which you can select to access the different share options.

If you’d still rather share a hard copy of an article you’ve found, you can print your clipping by selecting it from “Your Clippings” and choosing the “Print” option. When it prints, it will include not only the article but the newspaper name and article date as well.

For other tips on using Newspapers.com, visit our “Newspapers.com basics” page.

When Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, started the Toll House restaurant in 1930 in Whitman, Massachusetts, they had no idea that their restaurant would become the birthplace of an American cultural icon: the chocolate chip cookie. The extremely popular Toll House restaurant was especially well-known for its desserts, one of the humbler of which was ice cream with a butterscotch nut cookie. Then sometime in the mid-1930s, Ruth Wakefield decided she wanted to try something a little different for that cookie—and what she came up with was the chocolate crunch cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie.

With its bits of Nestlé’s semi-sweet chocolate bar, the chocolate crunch cookie was a hit at the restaurant, and people began asking for the recipe. Soon, the cookie was being featured in newspaper columns and radio broadcasts. As sales of the cookie at the restaurant skyrocketed, so did sales of Nestlé’s semi-sweet chocolate bar when people began trying the recipe in their own kitchens.
In March 1939, Wakefield sold the rights to the Toll House name and cookie recipe to Nestlé, and the recipe for the cookies—now called Toll House cookies—was printed on the packaging of their semi-sweet chocolate. Nestlé even began scoring their chocolate bars in smaller sections especially for the cookies and in 1940 introduced chocolate morsels specifically to make the cookie-baking process even easier.

In the early 1940s, the recipe for Toll House cookies was printed and reprinted in newspapers nationwide. After some early changes to the recipe, it essentially remained unaltered from 1939 until 1979, when Nestlé’s original 40-year agreement ended. Nestlé has since made several minor changes to the recipe, the most obvious of which were increasing the cookie size from half a teaspoon to a tablespoon and decreasing the cooking time. The result was that the Toll House cookie went from a small, crunchy, brown cookie to the larger, chewy, golden version we’re familiar with today.

Newspapers.com is full of articles and recipes documenting the history of the Toll House cookie. Be sure to check out these clippings:

• An early chocolate crunch cookie recipe, a transition recipe between the chocolate crunch cookie and the Toll House cookie, the classic Toll House cookie recipe, and the current recipe
• Early ads for pre-made Toll House cookies and for Nestlé’s semi-sweet chocolate bars and semi-sweet morsels
• Later, more elaborate ads for Nestlé’s semi-sweet morsels, including these gems from 1948, 1954, and 1955
• Retrospectives on Toll House cookies on the 20th and 50th anniversaries of their creation

Searching a newspaper by keyword is a modern convenience. Historically—and by necessity—newspapers were intended to be perused page by page. Today, we call such online perusing “browsing.”

Browsing newspapers online can be especially enlightening. It’s a great mix of history and modernity. Start with a location, time period, or paper. Then, page by page, story by story, read up on how people lived, worked, and played. Discover how communities handled newsworthy—and not so newsworthy—daily events: social, political, meteorological, and beyond.

From natural disasters to sports, from obituaries to society columns, our ancestors learned about their neighbors in black and white. Today, you can browse the papers on Newspapers.com and meet your ancestors’ neighbors. Read about their joys, tragedies, and scandals; how the crops fared; or if the merchants had a good year.

Once you’ve located an item of interest, searching within a browse can take you to additional stories quickly. While browsing a 1931 issue of The Altoona Herald in Iowa, a notice about F. J. Dunkle’s new store in Berwick caught this staff reporter’s eye.

To learn more about the store and Dunkle, select the “4 June 1931” breadcrumb* above the viewer to open the browse menu. Navigating left and selecting “1931” in the menu for year highlights that year and isolates a search to stories in that particular paper for 1931 only. Typing the words Dunkle and Berwick in the “Search within” box at the top leads to search results with front-page news on February 12: “Berwick Store Burns.” Reassuringly, we also discover that by July 23, Mr. and Mrs. Dunkle had “moved into their new home above the store” from an article that likewise mentions which of their neighbors were busy with trips, parties, and picnics that same week.

Because of the idiosyncrasies of OCR indexing, there are times when you know there’s a story within the pages of a particular edition, but a search doesn’t find what you’re looking for. That’s when you can enjoy reading a newspaper the old-fashioned way online—by browsing. The only experiences you’ll miss out on are the smells and rustle of the paper, and the ink rubbing off on your fingers.

* Breadcrumbs is an online navigation term describing the trail of links, usually at the top of a webpage, leading you back along your path to where you started. Fortunately, a path created by online breadcrumbs is more successful than the one left by Hansel and Gretel.

Most of us perform our favorite searches over and over, hoping to find new information about people or events we’re particularly interested in. At Newspapers.com, we make it easy for you to save those searches so you can repeat them more easily in the future. And, even better, we will email you to let you know when new papers are added that contain matches for your saved searches.

It’s all done via the “Save/Notify” button in the upper right corner of every search results page, just below your user name. Let’s say you’re interested in contemporary reports in Massachusetts newspapers about the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg.

After you perform the search, simply click the “Save/Notify” button on your search results page. Once clicked, the button will read “Saved” and you can click it again if you decide to “Unsave” it.

Now, as millions of pages are added to the site each month, you will not have to redo the search yourself to catch the most recent additions. Newspapers.com will do it for you and send an email when you have a new match for that specific search.

You can edit your saved search at any time as it appears on your profile page. To get there, click on your user name and choose “Your Profile” and you’ll see not only your clippings and saved searches, but also papers and people you’re following. You can click on any red link in that search box to return to the relevant search results page.

By default, your saved searches are set up for notifications and will be available for others to see. If you’d rather make a search private, locate your saved search and click the pencil icon to edit it.

Click the gear icon at the bottom of the popup window to view your options. You can uncheck “Public” to make your search private, and you can uncheck “Notify me of new matches” to opt out of being notified when new papers are added with relevant matches—although we’re not sure why you’d want to override such a nifty and convenient feature. You can also add a description of your search to help you find it more easily in the future.

If you have a particular search you find yourself doing repeatedly, choose the Save/Notify feature on Newspapers.com so you’ll know when we’ve added something you may be interested in.

When you find a story about an ancestor or someone in your family on Newspapers.com, you can clip the article and link it to your family tree on Ancestry.com. The “Save to Ancestry” button is at the top right of the viewer and also on every clipping page, making it easy for you to create links directly to Ancestry.com.

It’s easy and intuitive. Locate a news story you want to attach to someone you’ve already recorded in an Ancestry family tree, and then click the “Save to Ancestry” button and follow the instructions.

You’ll be asked to log into your Ancestry.com account after which you’ll see the name of your tree, or a list of tree names if you have more than one. Locate the tree you wish to save the document to, begin typing the name of the person to whom the record should be attached, choose the correct name from the list that appears, and then press save.

You’ll then be given a choice. You can close the window and continue searching for more articles on Newspapers.com, or you can view the profile of the person you attached the record to on Ancestry.com. If you choose the latter, you’ll be taken to that person’s profile page where you can view the record link. It will appear under “Source Information” on the right side of the page as a citation link to your clipping on Newspapers.com. The clipped image is not added to your ancestor’s profile, but the link is. If you click that link, you’ll return to Newspapers.com and the full clipping will appear.

You will also find a list of all Newspapers.com links you’ve attached to someone’s profile under “Source Citations” within the Facts and Sources tab on the tree. If you want to learn a trick for saving an image of the clipping to Ancestry.com, in addition to the clipping link, watch the Save to Ancestry.com tutorial. Additional video tutorials can be found in the Help Center under Newspapers.com Basics.