Why do you use Newspapers.com? To look for information on your ancestors? To research a specific topic? To learn more about a certain time or place? Newspapers.com members are taking advantage of all of these possibilities. Though genealogy is one of the most common uses, our members are utilizing our historical newspapers to do all sorts of unique research.

For instance, paderamo is researching historical chess matches, while ramblinkc is reading up on local sports of decades past. Cupper1001 is looking into Pennsylvania articles about railroads, and jrtate_lotbl is clipping stories on crime in Raleigh, North Carolina. Other members are interested in general local history, as seen in kinnelon59‘s research into happenings in Duryea, Pennsylvania, or cruther64‘s into Hamilton, Ohio. Sometimes members’ interests even overlap, like smkolins‘s and DrTroxel‘s clippings on the Baha’i Faith.

But you don’t necessarily have to be researching a particular subject to find fascinating articles. Among various members’ clippings, you can find articles about a family who walked 1,200 miles to talk to the president, as well as a court case where the faithfulness of the defendant’s wife convinced the judge to lower his sentence. Other interesting articles that have been clipped recently have included ones about a dog who made a “career out of going to school,” a “forgotten bomb” that exploded in a courthouse, and a man who trapped rats as large as cats. And don’t miss this photo a user found of Albert Einstein and his sister. Can you spot the family resemblance?

Curious about what other Newspapers.com members are up to? Try visiting their profile pages or the “All Clippings” page.

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.

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.

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!

Take five minutes and learn how to use Newspapers.com through a new video tutorial now available in the “Newspapers.com Basics” section of the Help Center.

The video explains how to navigate the site and reviews search, advanced search, and browse techniques. It also includes an overview of the clippings feature, how to clip an article, create a headline, share your discoveries with others, and save your searches.

Enjoy the video and let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see in the next tutorials already in the planning stages. We hope this video presentation helps you make the most of your visits to Newspapers.com.

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.