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.

This post was most recently updated on January 25, 2019

If a simple search on Newspapers.com for an ancestor’s name isn’t returning the results you want, try including wildcards, quotation marks, or Boolean operators in your search.

Wildcards are great if there are multiple spellings or possible misspellings of a name. Two common wildcards are the question mark [?] and asterisk [*].

• Use a question mark to replace a single letter. For example, if the person you’re searching for has the surname “Johansen” but you aren’t sure if it’s spelled –son or –sen, you can search [Johans?n], and that will return results for both “Johanson” and “Johansen,” as well as other variations.
• Use an asterisk to replace multiple letters. If you think there might be a double S in the surname “Johansen,” searching for [Johan*n] will return results for “Johansen” and “Johanssen,” in addition to “Johanson,” “Johansson,” and other possible spellings.

You can also make use of quotation marks to keep two or more words next to each other in the results

• Use quotation marks to keep first and last name together. For example a search for [William D Johansen] results in 218,116 matches, while [“William D Johansen”] yields 8 matches.
• Also, don’t be afraid to remove quotation marks from your search term if your not getting the results you want and try filtering by location and/or year to narrow the search results.

Boolean operators can help you focus your search. Two common ones are “or” and “not.”

• Use “or” between your search terms to return matches that have either (or both) of your terms. For instance, if you are searching for news stories that mention either William Johansen or his brother, John, you can search for [“William Johansen” OR “John Johansen”] and the search will return results with matches for just William Johansen or just John Johansen, as well as results with both names.
• Use “not” between search terms to help eliminate irrelevant results. If you are searching for “William Johansen” but you don’t want to see any results that also talk about his brother, John, you can search for [“William Johansen” NOT “John Johansen”], and that will get rid of any matches for William that also mention John.
• Another example of using “not”  is for common phrases or places. A last name like Francisco may return search results for the city of San Francisco. Search [“Charles Francisco” NOT “San Francisco”].

So if you’re having trouble finding the right person in your search results, try using wildcards, quotation marks, or Boolean operators!

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.