Newspapers.com

About:

There are many online newspaper archives. Newspapers.com claims to be the largest one. It is owned by Ancestry. You can use keywords, date, and/or location for searching their holdings. “Clipped” articles can be saved and downloaded.

To use Newspapers.com, you need an account. (They offer a one-week free trial.) Before you hand over your money, make sure it has access to the newspapers from the time and place you’re interested in. For instance, not one newspaper from Knox County, Ohio, is in their holdings.

My Opinion:

We’re lucky to have so much digitized information available to us now. Only a few years ago, I had to spend days scanning the microfilmed pages of The El Paso Morning Times for little nuggets of information I needed that were buried among ads for women’s dresses and baseball scores. I nearly went cross-eyed and about died of boredom. Using Newspapers.com, I found that information and scads more in a matter of hours without wasting my time reading anything extra. Technology is a real blessing—when it works.

I have used Newspapers.com for both family history work and book research. Mostly, I’ve been pleased with the results, but the website’s search engine is far from perfect. Some of the problem stems from print quality and typos in the newspapers, so you might want to play with alternative spellings, or substitute a lowercase “e” for an “o”. The other big problem I’ve run into is when I’m searching for someone’s name. Even if I put the first and last names together inside quote marks, the search engine will highlight nonconsecutive words.