People love reading about themselves in the paper. Gossip about others ranks right up there, too. Historically, vacation and travel information were regular features in newspapers around the country, especially in summertime.

Let’s check in on a few of these “personals” columns to get news of vacation plans for residents of communities around the country in decades past. In an August 1890 issue of The Ironwood Times in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we learn that Florence Bassett returned from her vacation to Minnesota, and Dr. McLeod was heading there for a chicken hunt, after meeting up with his buddies John Ross and attorney George Hayden.

An entire page of The Galveston Daily News in July 1923 was devoted to “The Week’s Society in Various Texas Towns.” In this section, we learn that Dr. and Mrs. Norris and their little son spent a month in California before returning to Madisonville, TX. In the column next to it, we read that several people in Sealy “motored” to their destinations.

If you were picnicking and swimming at Stonewall Sportsman’s Club Lake in Ada, OK, in August 1962 and wondered why the Morgans were driving a blue car, you’ll learn that they had car trouble and had to borrow one. Those were the days when everyone’s business was a community affair.

A hundred years ago, Floridians headed out of state on their vacations. Dr. Liken and his wife left the beach for a sojourn in the mountains before spending several weeks in New York City. Rev. Bowen, while vacationing in Kansas, wrote his wife that he “had really forgotten how disagreeable Kansas weather is” as it was 110 in the shade and dust was flying.

As people traveled a lot, there were obviously others ready to receive visitors. The Kokomo Tribune in Indiana reported on house guests, as well as reunions. Sometimes these help us find family relationships like when Miss Aseneth Hanson visited her sister Mrs. Billy Jackson, in the Oakland neighborhood.

Naturally, Canadians like to vacation, too, so it’s no surprise to find news in The Winnipeg Tribune under “At the Beaches” in August 1922 with a list of 15 families enjoying their summer vacations by the water.

Search for family surnames in locations your ancestors and their cousins may have lived. Add keywords—vacation, visit, guest, travel—if you want to concentrate your search on a particular activity. Or, simply browse the society or community columns for your family’s local paper on Newspapers.com to see what summer adventures they had.

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.

Searching for names and keywords in newspapers can be challenging, especially when you’re looking for someone whose name is the same as a prolific noun or verb in the English language. Surnames like Rose, Wells, Fudge, and Burns are tricky to separate from their everyday usage when you’re looking for people, not words, in newspaper articles.

Understanding the quirks of how typed text is indexed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR)*, may help you in your searches on Newspapers.com. You’ll soon develop unique strategies for getting the results you want.

Whether you search directly from the search box on the homepage or click the “Search” link at the top of most pages, adding fields for dates and a location will narrow your search results. You can also make use of quotation marks to keep two or more words next to each other in the results. For example, a search for Henry Fudge brings 65,731 matches, while “Henry Fudge” yields 37. Results for Rose Allen exceed 1.5 million, while “Rose Allen” provides a much more manageable 1,770 matches.

An 18-year-old Pennsylvania socialite named Rose Allen made headline news across the nation in 1931-32 when her brother allegedly murdered her sweetheart. If the Rose Allen we seek is a different woman, we’ll want to narrow our search by time period and place to filter out all the results that pop up from the brother’s murder trial and Rose’s testimony. Use the date and location filters on the left of the search results page, add an additional search term outside of the quotation marks (try a profession, relative’s name, or event title), or even confine your search to a specific newspaper under “Narrow by Newspapers.” Reducing the matches and further adjusting your search filters will ultimately lead you to the news you’re looking for if it’s available.

Once you create a specific search sequence that works for you, save it as a clipping by clicking the “Clip” link on the upper right. As more papers are added to Newspapers.com, you can return and easily perform the same search again using those clipped search parameters.

* Visit the Help Center on Newspapers.com. Under Newspapers.com Basics, OCR is explained as: All the pages on Newspapers.com have been indexed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This means that a computer has tried to identify the words on each page and produce a digital version to search. When the image is clean and in good condition, this process is very accurate and can make searching papers easy. For older papers or other papers where the image is less clear, the OCR processing may miss important words or read them incorrectly.