To research historical newspapers and be successful, it helps to be educated about the characteristics of these important history and genealogy resources; where to find them, and how to best search for the articles that you are seeking. 

These lessons are from my own historical newspaper research experience, which encompasses several years of both online as well as offline research. Online newspaper research is not just a matter of entering a surname or a word in a search box.  By understanding and applying these lessons, you can achieve a much better chance of finding the extremely helpful and interesting articles that exist about history and our ancestors.



The lessons below will go a long way to improving your research skills:

• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 1 - Where To Find
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 2 - Search Basics
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 3 - Browsing
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 4 - Search Index and OCR
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 5 - Boolean Searches
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 6 - How to Change Your Searches to Get Better Results
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 7 - Don't Search Just Surnames
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 8 - Use Hyphenated Search
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 9 - Use Abbreviations
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 10 - Newspapers at the Library
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 11 - Use Special Keywords in Searches​
• Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 12 - Choosing a Site to Search
• ​Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 13 - Search Tips and What to Avoid

By reading and applying these relatively short articles I GUARANTEE you will locate many more pertinent historical; newspaper articles!

This is next in a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 13 is a conglomeration of search tips and mistakes to avoid while searching and analyzing your results.

When researching old newspapers, there are many things that you need to know and many mistakes that can be made when drawing conclusions about the articles you find, or downloading images, etc. 

​Here are some tricks and tips as well as what to avoid:

• Always write down the title of the newspaper, the date of publication and the page number where you found the article - when you find the article. You don't want to have to do another search in the future to find out where you found it.

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• Sometimes the final resting place is not accurate in the obituary. Maybe the family changed their minds or maybe the cemetery closed and all the graves were moved to another cemetery.

• If the online site you are using gives you the opportunity to correct scanning and OCR errors - please do so if you find an error (and there are many!) Pay it forward.

• Divorces Filed and Interlocutory Decrees are not Divorces. Only Divorces Granted count.

• Issuance of a license is not a marriage. Maybe the wedding didn't take place or wasn't recorded. But the "Marriage Licenses Issued" section in the Vital Statistics part of the paper is not proof that a wedding occurred.

• Thought must go into saving the articles that you find online. Is the image large enough? Is it readable later? Are there options with the online site to download the image in different formats? Think ahead so you don't have to do the search again at a later date.

• I would not limit your search for newspaper titles to just the city of residence. Span out a bit and include the newspaper for the county seat. There is likely to be different types of information published in the newspapers for that likely larger populated area.

• If your target lived near the state border, check out neighboring state newspapers. For example, if they lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, check out the Omaha, Nebraska papers. Or if they lived in Camden, New Jersey, try the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania newspapers. 

• Unique human interest articles were copied all over the country and world. One of my ancestors was given Geronimo's knife in the 1880's in California and the article was published in papers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana and London, England as a human interest story. So take that into consideration.

• Don't just search for articles for the dates that the ancestor was alive. Often, newspapers had a column that featured stories from 10 years ago, 25 years ago, etc. and your ancestor might be mentioned in that column. Furthermore, if your ancestor was well known in the community, he or she might be referred to in an article a few years after his death. This is tricky if your ancestor has a common name and date ranges are important to narrowing the number of search results.

• When searching for obituaries, include a couple of weeks after the death of the ancestor. Many times the obituary publication was delayed, but more importantly, some obituaries were changed after their original publication because of errors, modifications, or additions. So don't just stop searching after you have found the first one.

• Regarding obituaries, don't just limit your search to the location of the ancestors death. Many times the obituary is copied (and possibly altered) in newspapers in the area where your ancestor had lived previously.

This is next in a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 12 is all about finding and selecting online collections of newspapers that you can access, browse and search.

There are three types of online sites – free, subscription, and library/archive.  The first two are self explanatory.  The third requires that you have a library card at a library that has subscriptions available that they have paid for. Some offer remote access and others require that you physically be at the library or archive.


Free Online Sites

Once you have determined the type of site – how do you decide if the site might bear fruit for you?  Here are some criteria to use:

Select a site that has a collection for where your target search occurred. Then do your search. There are hundreds of county, state and province based collections that may provide with you with newspapers that are not in the big collections. If you don't know which newspapers are available for your desired location, you can always use this Library of Congress database for American newspapers. It also shows where offline newspapers might be located in archives, libraries and other institutions.

Check the dates of the newspapers that are available in their collection.  Don't bother searching if the location is right but the dates don't fit and vice versa.

There are specialty collections as well. For example African-American newspapers, Jewish newspapers, student newspapers, union newspapers, and even farming newspapers.

How to Choose a Subscription Site 

There are a few subscription historic newspaper sites, such as Newspapers.com, Newspaper Archive, Genealogy Bank and British News Archive.  How do you choose which ones to subscribe to?  A lot of articles can be found in free collections, but their content is different than what is available from the pay sites.  Here are a few criteria to consider:

Collections Available - just as in Real Estate where the motto is "Location, location, location" - the motto for subscription newspaper research sites is "Database, database, database." I get asked all the time if someone should purchase a subscription to site A.  I always ask them first - for the states, cities or areas that they are researching, as well as the dates that they are researching, does the site have a collection of newspapers available?  All sites have a list of what newspapers and dates are in their collections.  Check those out before you buy.

Price and Billing Practices - some of the aforementioned sites are 4 times as expensive as others. Some have a monthly plan, some only bill annually. Some auto-renew and some do not. If you purchase a subscription it is incumbent on you to read the terms of the subscription as well as the fine print. As always with any purchase online - it is buyer-be AWARE.

Scan and OCR Quality - the index that the site has created is only as good as the quality of the original scan and the OCR software that they use to build the index. Were the newspapers scanned from originals or from microfilm, or from copies of microfilm? Some of the collections that I have seen have an extremely poor quality image displayed after selecting a search result.  This indicates to me that the original image that they applied the OCR process to was degraded and hence the index certainly will suffer.  In other words - your ancestor is mentioned but the scan was so lousy that the OCR process could not build an acceptable index entry with the correct spelling of the name.

User Interface and Searching Features – sites have different user interfaces - some are simple and easy to use; some have richer capabilities and features. I always like to try the "Advanced Search" features because that generally indicates the total breadth of capability. And one must read the Help documentation for each of these sites. Generally they will explain which type of search criteria can be entered, for example Boolean and proximity searches. Quite honestly I have heard many subscribers complain about not finding anything when they haven't even tried to learn all the search capabilities available to them.

Subscription collections can be a gold mine and if you are strapped financially, many of them have a short term free trial or other methods to access their collections inexpensively.

Library Sites

This topic has already been covered in Lesson 10 - Newspapers at the Library.  I suggest that you refer to this lesson for much detail.

Chronicling America, through its new labs.loc.gov capability, is adding crowdsourcing of historic newspaper cartoons and photographs, which will allow users to provide captions for these images.

From the announcement of this new feature, entitled "Beyond Words":

"The Library of Congress today launched labs.loc.gov, a new online space that will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources designed to encourage creative use of the Library’s digital collections. To help demonstrate the exciting discoveries that are possible, the new site will also feature a gallery of projects from data challenge winners and innovators-in-residence and blog posts and video presentations from leaders in the field.
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“We already know the Library of Congress is the ultimate treasure chest, but with labs.loc.gov we are inviting explorers to help crack open digital discoveries and share the collections in new and innovative ways,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Whether you’re tagging images from our digitized historic newspapers to help future visitors, or exploring the changing nature of democracy through the 25 million bibliographic records the Library recently made public, we are providing tools and inspiration that will lead to new uses and new ways of looking at the incredible materials here at the Library.”

One of the first features on labs.loc.gov is Beyond Words, a website that invites the public to identify cartoons and photographs in historic newspapers and provide captions that will turn images into searchable data. This fun crowdsourcing program grows the data set of text available for researchers who use visualization, text analysis and other digital humanities methodologies to discover new knowledge from Chronicling America—the Library’s large collection of historic American newspapers. Beyond Words is available as a pilot project to help the Library of Congress learn more about what subsets of Library data researchers are interested in and to grow the Library’s capacity for crowdsourcing."

To read the entire article click on Library Launches labs.loc.gov

This is exciting news that will enable users through crowdsourcing to add captions that when added to the search index, will enable an added search experience of Chronicling America.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 11 is all about searching old, historic newspapers using specialized keywords in your search criteria to help get better results.

When entering our search criteria in the search box on an online historical newspaper site, we often focus primarily on the name of the target ancestor or family.  We might also search for a location or an address. or combine these with a name.


My guess is that well over 95% of online newspaper searches employ the above techniques.

I offer you some additional ways to hone in on target ancestor articles, and this is to use keywords in your search criteria. Here are some examples, that if used will get you more and better results:

• If you are searching for obituaries, add the keyword "beloved" or "beloved son" or "beloved wife" etc. The word beloved is used frequently in obituaries. So entering these keywords plus the surname may focus in on obituaries.
• Similar to "beloved" try the word "dear", as in "dear husband" or "dear sister." This will also focus in on obituaries.
• A third keyword used in obituaries is "loving".  For example, "loving daughter" or  "loving husband".
• If you are searching for a birth announcement, add in the keywords "born to the wife of"  or "born to" along with the name and that will focus in on articles about births.
• Was your ancestor a business owner?  Add the word "president" or "proprietor" to the name.
• How about lodges and clubs? Try "president" or "chairman" or "secretary" for example.
• Try using the occupation in your search criteria, such as "electrician" or "plumber" in conjunction with the name.

There are likely many more examples. Try adding keywords - you will be glad you did.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 10 is all about searching old, historic newspapers at the library! (When I say "library" I include archives and educational institutions).

Many history and genealogy researchers who are used to searching for articles about their ancestors, other people, and historical events in historic newspapers have gotten spoiled with the increased number of online collections that are available for free. And many have invested a few dollars (and other currency) in subscriptions to online sites and collections.

But did you know that there are other quite large collections that are available via your local library or a library that may require a little bit more drive time?

One example of such a service is Readex. They have a few thousand titles that are searchable, depending on the subscription that your library has invested in.  I won't comment positively or negatively on their capability or functionality. Just try Readex and other library based sites to expand your research.  (Disclosure:  I do not have any affiliation with Readex/NewsBank - I am using them as an example of library-based services)

Here are some examples of what they might have available with a link to find out the exact titles that are in each collection:

• Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922

• American Ethnic Newspapers

• American Newspaper Archives 

• 20th Century American Newspapers

• Caribbean Newspapers

• World Newspaper Archive

Now, these are online collections that are available only at the library.  And there are others - from Gale, Accessible Archives, Paper of Record, just to name a few.

And guess what - libraries do have microfilmed newspapers and original newsprint.  Since about 20% of all old newspapers have been digitized (author's estimate), do not forget to use these two sources as well.

So, get out of your PJ's and get in your car and go to your library or other institution that have these types of resources available - AND if you have a library card you might just be able to login and search from home!!!

Do not forget to browse microfilm and original newsprint as well.  Does it take more time?  Indeed it does. But these two sources may be the only ones that have an article of importance to you.

Newspapers are being digitized at an increasing rate, so search the free sites online, invest in a subscription as well, but for sure - do not forget the old standby - your library.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 9 is all about searching old, historic newspapers and capitalizing by using abbreviations in your search criteria.

In old newspapers, abbreviations were used to save space. Abbreviations were used to shorten many words - the most notable being given names as well as addresses.

Remember that your search criteria is just a series of letters that are matched against a search index that was created from the scan and OCR process applied to the subject newspaper page.

Your search index database is not smart enough, for example, to interpret "ave." for the word "avenue."  So if you are entering "335 14th Avenue" - if the search index includes "Ave" the search will not be successful. Therefore you must search both "335 14th Avenue" and "335 14th Ave" to get all ;possible results.

Here are some examples of abbreviations that you should employ in your search criteria:

1. For street names, try "ave" and "avenue" Also "st" and "street". There is a great number of others that you should consider for the "type" of "street.
2. For cities, if there is an abbreviation - for example NYC for New York City, or Philly for Philadelphia, try the abbreviation as well as the whole city name.
3. How about business names - "co" and "company", "inc" and "incorporated", etc.
4. Given names can provide a great number of increased results by using abbreviations.  Try abbreviations for names, such as "Wm" for William, or "Jno" for John, or "Jos" for Joseph, "Eliz" for Elizabeth, and "Robt" for Robert, just to name a few. Here is a terrific list from Genealogy In Time.
5. One often forgotten is "Mrs." Remember that married women were not always addressed with their first name in a newspaper article, but were written as Mrs. Robert Smith for example, regardless if their name was Mildred, Margaret, or Mary.  So incorporate that into your search criteria.
6. This one is a bit unique.  But if you are searching classified ads, you can always search for a phone number. We certainly don't know the phone numbers from many 20th century ancestors, but if you happen to find it in a telephone directory, you might find classified ads in newspapers by searching that phone number. When I was a kid, our number was Elgin 1-1696, so I would search for "Elgin" as well as "El" before the numbers.
7. For military titles, try "Capt" for Captain, Col" for "Colonel", Sgt" for Sergeant, etc.

There may be many others, so you need to search for abbreviated words as well as entire words to maximize your search results.  My guess is that you can likely increase your pertinent results by 10 to 20%.

The University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries has just announced that they have received a grant from the Commission for the Las Vegas Centennial to fund digitization projects.










From the UNLV Library:

"The first grant, for $49,400, will fund the digitization of the Las Vegas Age, which ran from 1905-1947, and the region’s first newspaper, the Las Vegas Times, which ran from 1905-1906. The grant will be used to create an online, searchable versions of the two newspapers through the University Libraries website.

These newspapers are of great historical value for the City of Las Vegas and give a glimpse of what was happening during the early years of Las Vegas,” said Michelle Light, director of Special Collections and Archives. “By adding these historical newspapers to our online collections, we will be able to make them available to researchers around the world and preserve key documents chronicling the history of our community,” Light said."


​To read the entire article, click on: UNLV Libraries Receive Two Grants

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Terrific News from the State of Nevada!

For access to historic newspapers from the state that are currently available for free online, please check out​​Nevada Online Historical Newspapers Summary. 

The State of Arizona has just announced that they have received funding that will enable the state to add 100,000 historical newspaper pages to their collection in Chronicling America.  





From the state:

"We are honored and extremely excited to continue the Digital Newspaper Project,” said Secretary Reagan.  “The addition of these papers to the online collections will nurture a fuller appreciation for and understanding of the diverse forces which have combined to create our unique Arizona identity.

The new grant will digitize another 100,000 pages which will make the total online newspaper collection almost 500,000 pages.

UA hopes to digitize some non-English newspapers including one of the longest-running Spanish-language Mexican American newspapers in Arizona, El Tucsonense (1915-1922)."

For the complete article, please click on UA given grant to continue digitizing newspapers

Terrific News from the State of Arizona!


For access to historic newspapers from the state that are currently available for free online, please check out​​
Arizona Online Historical Newspapers Summary.

This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 8 is all about searching old, historic newspapers and capitalizing by searching hyphenated words properly.

Finding articles in newspapers is in my opinion - an art, not a science. One must be clever and resourceful to get around the limitations in old newspapers, whether they be poor original quality, copies of copies as sources for scanning, as well as the limitations of the OCR process.

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Another "feature" of older newspapers is the use of the hyphen. Hyphenated words were often used because of fixed width type as well as the experience and capability of the typesetter. Hyphens are less utilized today but were heavily used years ago. 

The bottom line is that if you search for a portion of your ancestor's surname (if it is multi-syllabic), rather than the entire word, you may get additional results. For example, if your ancestors name was "Jorgenson" try searching for "Jorgen." The typesetter may have split the word so that at the end of one line are the letters "Jorgen-" with the hyphen, and the next line may start with "son".

I have an ancestral line with the surname "Braunhart".  Many times an article may have a line that ends with "Braun-" and the next line starts with "hart".  This creates some additional challenges, just like "Williamson" may be split up as "William" and "son".  The first set of letters ends up being a very common set of letters so your results may be too numerous to be of much help.

Here are a few examples that show the different uses of the hyphen. And always consider that the "break" may not always be in the logical place in the word.

• You could search for "Patter" when your target name was "Patterson"
• Even a short word like "Hardie" is split up in this example, so you would search for "Har".  This may lead to too many results but is worth a try.
• Be open minded about where the split may occur.  In the case of McDonald I wouldn't think that the name would be split with "McDon" and "ald", but searching for odd splits may lead to many more results.

Don't give up and let hyphens give you additional opportunities and additional searches.  You will indeed find more articles this way. Be creative! Don't be bogged down by 21st century logic. The split may be different than you would think it should be.