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.

If you have both a Newspapers.com account and an Ancestry account, you can easily save something you’ve found on Newspapers.com to your Ancestry Family Tree.

1. Once you’ve found newspaper content you want to save to your Ancestry Family Tree, make a clipping of it, and then in the popup box that appears, select the green button with the Ancestry logo. (You can alternatively select the green “Save to Ancestry” button at the top of the viewer, which will allow you to select the portion of the page you want to clip and save to Ancestry.)
2. After you selected the “Save to Ancestry” option, a popup box will appear that will allow you to sign in to your Ancestry account. Once you’re signed in, select the tree and then person that you want to associate the clipping with, and select “Next.”
3. In the next box, you can add or edit information about the clipping, including the title, date, location, and comments. If you want the clipping to appear on the person’s LifeStory page on Ancestry, simply make sure the “Show on LifeStory” box is checked. If you don’t want it to appear on their LifeStory, uncheck the box. Then select “Save.”

And that’s it! The clipping will now be saved to Ancestry and will appear on your ancestor’s LifeStory. You can also access it on the person’s Facts or Gallery pages.

If you have a clipping you’ve created in the past that you want to now save to Ancestry, all you need to do is go to the clipping (accessible from the My Clippings page), and select the green “Save to Ancestry” button at the top. Then follow the same instructions as above.

Find more helpful tips at the Newspapers.com Help Center!

There’s a new video tutorial available in the Newspapers.com Help Center. “Searching Newspapers.com” joins “An Introduction to Newspapers.com” and demonstrates effective ways to search for people and historical events in the millions of pages available on the Newspapers site.

“Searching Newspapers.com” shows how to narrow a search by date and location, how to add a range of dates to your search criteria, how to save a search so you can be notified if new results are added, and how to alter a search without starting from scratch. It also explains the limitations of placing search terms within quotation marks.

Both video tutorials are about five minutes in length and are full of useful tips. You may want to pause or navigate backward and forward so you can review the steps more thoroughly. They are accompanied in the Help Center by many other help topics like clipping, following a paper or person, using profile pages, and printing and downloading an image or clipping. Send us your feedback and let us know if there’s a topic you’d like to see explained more fully through a video tutorial.

View the new search tutorial video today!

Newspaper clippings are significant in both historical and sentimental ways. If you’ve ever discovered clipped gems in a library file, posted on a bulletin board, folded into a letter, stuck between the pages of a book, or pasted into an album, then you know of their appeal. A clipping directs us to a snippet of valuable news or focuses our attention to a seemingly casual item that must have been important to the person who clipped it in the first place.

On Newspapers.com, clippings are elevated to a digital level. Unlike those in dusty scrapbooks or creased inside yellowing envelopes, the clippings on Newspapers.com maintain their quality, are more discoverable, and easier to share with others. We can clip to our heart’s content without worrying about losing a scrap of paper or watching important words smudge and fade over time.

The Clippings link is readily accessible at the top of every page. Click on it to view your clippings as well as those of others. Browse through recently clipped items for an intriguing glimpse at what others find interesting in the online newspapers. Of course, creating your own clippings is a lot of fun, too.

Anytime you come across an article you’d like to save or share, reach for your virtual scissors by choosing “Clip” at the top of the viewer window. Drag the edges of the box that appears around the item of interest, add a description if you wish, and your clipping will be saved in “Your Clippings” for you to find again. You can share your clip through a variety of options to the right under “Share this clip.” Choose to send the link to another, embed it in a webpage, or share it with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Newsprint clippings of the past often show up without a paper’s name or publication date. With Newspapers.com that’s no longer a problem as each clipping is saved with the publication’s title and date permanently attached. If you choose to print a clipping, that important information is printed as well.

A clipping can be an article, search, page, newspaper, or another member’s profile. It’s a great way to save things you like, share interesting stories you find, and stay up to date on things that interest you.

Clippings are so ubiquitous, it’s easy to find references to “newspaper clippings” spanning decades and regions by searching on Newspapers.com. Here are some links to clippings about, well … clippings! This Staff Reporter feels a bit like her mother, sending these clippings to you, our readers. But, we’ve all been on the sending or receiving end at some point in our lives, right? Enjoy!

• Harvey P. Daggert told his life story through clippings in California in 1964.
• In 1942, branch libraries in Hope, Arkansas, measured their circulation in books and clippings.
• Texas coaches debated motivating their athletes in 1976 through bulletin board clippings.
• In 1901, a newspaper clipping proved important to an appointment in the U.S. Navy.
• A $4 bid brought a West Virginia woman a picnic hamper full of clippings and letters in 1970.
• Clipping bureaus were already doing a brisk business in 1895.

We had a great time talking to people about the site at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City last month. We got to meet people, show them the site and to get their feedback and suggestions.

For most of the people that I spoke to, the first question they had was, “What do you have for [fill in the location]?” People had a place, and often a time period, they were interested in and wanted to know if we had newspapers that could help them.

There are a few different ways to see what we have on the site and each has its benefits.  At the top of each page of the site you’ll find links to “Browse” and “Papers”, both of which will show you what we have for a particular area.

Browse
The Browse page let’s you start with a country, narrow to state, city and then date. It gives you a quick sense for what is available by location and is particularly helpful if you are interested in papers from a certain city.

The Papers Page
The Papers page lists all the papers we have alphabetically by title, but you can use the map on the left side of the page to narrow the list and just show papers from a give state. You can even add a date range to further narrow your list. Then you can search within just those papers or click on an individual paper to learn more about what we have for that paper.

In addition to the US papers we have, you’ll find a few from England and Canada if you click on “World” above the map.

State Pages
Recently we’ve been working on a new set of pages that we hope will help showcase what we have for each state. We’re still trying to get them right, but you can have a look at them and let us know what you think.

Here are the states we currently have papers for with links to their pages:

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin

So, for now we’re missing Hawaii, Vermont and Wyoming, but we’re working hard to get some good papers for those states.

We also have pages for a couple of non-US locations: Canada and England.

We’re adding millions of pages to the site each month, so if you don’t see what you are looking for today, don’t forget to check back later and be sure to let us know if there is a paper or a location you are interested in.