Searching Historical Newspapers

How Do I Search the Newspapers? (See “How Do I Increase my Chances of Search Success?” also)
Search for names using the search box in the Historical Newspapers Collection, or choose a specific newspaper, year, and date, and browse the individual papers for that day. The main Newspaper Search page can be accessed from the homepage by clicking on “Historical Newspapers (1786-2001)” located under More Genealogy Records.

How Do I Increase my Chances of Search Success?
Use the search engine and also browse through relevant newspaper pages. You can use a search engine to search for specific words, and this method will be faster, but for the most in-depth search, trust your own eyes when you can identify relevant newspaper pages to search (i.e., newspaper pages where you know ancestors lived, especially significant dates when they might have been featured, like death). We use the best OCR technology currently available but it is still less accurate than human eyes and brains.

Why are Some Images More Difficult to Read than Others?
Older newspapers are often damaged. Older newspapers are likely to have poorer images and be more difficult to search because of wear and tear – on either the original newspaper, or on the original microfilm. You need to be especially careful of this concern when performing word searches.

The results page is sorted from the oldest newspaper to the newest newspaper. Keep in mind that older newspapers are more faded and difficult to read, and are most likely to produce erroneous results when using the search engine for search.

Why are my Searches Bringing up the Wrong Matches?
The OCR technology used to index may confuse similar, but incorrect words, or may highlight hits (search matches) so they are slightly off-mark. Search results may include “matches” on words other than those you searched for because they are optically similar enough to your target word. For example, the surname Latten could be mistaken by the OCR for the word Ladder, because the “dd” in “Ladder” may fade in such a way to look like a “tt.”

If the highlighted hit isn’t even similar to the target word you were searching for make sure to look a couple lines above, below, and to the side of the highlighted area. Sometimes, a search hit highlight does not perfectly land on the correct word. This is because the OCR indexes by making a note of placement of the word on a page. Thus, when certain pages were enhanced to make viewing easier for our customers, a minor tilt of the page may have caused the words to be repositioned a small distance away from where they were when they were originally indexed.

Viewing Successful Matches, or “Hits”
Hits are highlighted when searching with the Advanced Viewer. When you perform a search for a name or a word, all possible matches, called “hits,” are highlighted in yellow. The current hit you are viewing is highlighted in green; when you go to the next hit, it will then turn green. In the free Advanced Viewer (vs. the Basic Viewer), you will be taken directly to a readable enlargement of the hit. If there are multiple hits on a page, click on the “next” or “previous” hit button to view next or previous pages. In the Basic Viewer, you will be taken to the newspaper page where the hits are found, but will need to use the viewer tools to zoom in on the text and browse for the hits. Thus, we highly recommend you use the free Advanced Viewer to have a more successful search experience.

Searching for Names with the Search Box
Make sure to use the search boxes correctly for the best results. When you type one word in the “first name” box and the surname in the “last name” box, the search engine will look for all newspaper pages where the two names are found close together. The search engine also does not recognize stop words, like “and,” “the,” “or.” Thus, if you searched for “John Smith,” by using the first name and second name box, the sentence “John and his brother Jack Smith” would likely be considered a match, since “and,” and “his” are stop words, and “brother Jack” is too small an amount of letters to separate the two main words.

Use the hit button to go quickly to results. There are often more than one hits on a page, so you will need to use the “hit” button on the right side of the Advanced Viewer to view the other matches found. Visit the Tools section of this Help Page for more on how to use the various tools on the newspaper viewer. When searching by first and last name non-adjacent words will still be considered hits, but there will be at least one set of words on the page in close proximity.

The Advanced Viewer has a strong advantage over the Basic Viewer. We strongly encourage you to use the Advanced Viewer over the Basic Viewer because the Basic Viewer only allows you to zoom in on text by typing in percentages (i.e., view this image at 50 percent times its current size) and using arrows to move the text in certain directions. If you do not know where to download the Advanced Viewer, click here for directions.

Searching for Keywords
You cannot search for phrases unless you “cheat.” When doing a search by keyword, remember that you cannot search for phrases. If you enter more than one word in a search box, it will simply show results for all pages where all those words are on the same page, though they may be nowhere near each other on the page.

To find a couple of keywords in close proximity to each other, enter each word in the first and second name boxes. For instance, if you are searching for the Declaration of Independence, you can put “Declaration” in the box for first names, and “Independence” in the box for last names. The system will search for all instances where “Declaration” and “Independence” are found nearby each other.

Do not use quote marks as it will simply perform the same search as would happen without using quotes marks, except that your hits will not be highlighted for you.

Never put more than one word in the name search box or it will automatically treat it like a keyword search, and search for all instances where both words are found on the page, even if they are separated by several paragraphs.

Viewer Tool Tips

Which viewer am I using, basic or advanced?
If you are using the basic viewer, there will be a small link on top that says, “Switch to Advanced Viewer”. If you are using the advanced viewer, there will be a small link on the bottom of the page that says, “Switch to Basic Viewer”.

What is the difference between a Basic Viewer and an Advanced Viewer?
The Advanced Viewer is a vast improvement over the Basic Viewer and there is no reason to stay with the first unless you do not use Internet Explorer or if you are a Mac user, in which case, this viewer is not compatible. With the Advanced Viewer, you enjoy faster downloads, high quality printing, the ability to save images to disk, an option between positive or negative images, the ability to control brightness and contrast, a magnifying zoom, quick zooming and scrolling, and the ability to view highlighted hits.

I am using a Basic Viewer. How do I switch to an Advanced Viewer?
Click on the link, “Switch to Advanced Viewer,” immediately above the newspaper image you are viewing, on the left side. You will be taken to a page called, “Advanced Image Viewer Installation,” as our website automatically begins downloading the viewer. This process generally takes 10 minutes on a 56k modem.

How can I tell how many newspaper pages are available for the newspaper date I am looking at, and what page I am on?
The page number indicator is on the top right-hand corner of the Viewer tool. It will tell you which page you are currently viewing and how many pages are left for that date.