How to search online newspaper archives

Old British and Irish newspapers offer unparalleled insight into the lives of our ancestors - the occasions that marked their calendars, the talking points of the day, and what the ups and downs of their daily lives looked like. With handy search tools in your arsenal, it's never been easier to delve deeper and truly understand your roots. 

In partnership with the British Library, Findmypast has made an extensive catalogue of newspapers and periodicals available to search online. 

When beginning to explore digitised newspaper collections online, start with a simple search for a name or keyword - perhaps your grandmother's name, or the town she grew up in. 

Narrow down your research with search filters 

With over 90 million pages in Findmypast's historical archive, your initial search will likely return pages upon pages of results. To get closer to stories relevant to you and your family, you'll need to narrow your search using the filters provided. On Findmypast, you can filter newspapers, magazines and journals by: 

• Date published (choosing either a date range or a specific day) 
• Title of publication 
• County, place and country of publication 
• Date added to the newspaper archive 
• Free-to-view versus paid access articles 

You can also select to view only front pages and, under 'coverage type', filter by national, regional, or local newspapers. To explore photos, drawings, and other images, explore titles such as the Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. 

When searching newspaper pages spanning over three centuries, it can be time-consuming to sort through results to find articles containing the specific event, topic, or name you're looking for. Omitting irrelevant results from your search makes the process a lot easier - and this is where phrase searching comes in. 

By adding quotation marks around a term in the search bar, you can search for phrases exactly as they appear. You'll only be shown results in which your search term appears exactly. If you search for the "1851 Great Exhibition", you won't get articles about exhibitions in other decades. If you want to get even more specific, you could try searching for its full title - "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations". 

You can get even more granular with an advanced search, which allows you to adjust the flexibility of your phrase by specifying how many other words can appear between the terms in your phrase. For example:  

• “sutton coldfield rail crash”~0 – terms must be right next to each other  
• “sutton coldfield rail crash”~1 – could be up to 1 word between terms  
• “sutton coldfield rail crash”~2 – could be up to 2 word between terms 

If you're looking for specific people in the newspaper archives, you can search multiple names at once by adding a comma between them in the search bar. This is handy for narrowing down commonly appearing names, perhaps by including additional family members or others you know were involved in the event (for example, military service, an obituary or a wedding ceremony). 

As well as searching for keywords that are included in the newspaper articles, you can cleverly search for words and phrases that are not, like you can with genealogy records. If the term you're looking for commonly appears in an irrelevant context, such as the name of a ship or street, you can omit terms like 'HMS' or 'road' by adding these into the keyword box with a minus sign. 

To search for 'Britannia' excluding ship and street names, you can use the following search query in the keyword box: 

• Britannia -HMS, -yacht, -street, -road 

If you're struggling to find what you're looking for, you may be encountering a spelling issue. Perhaps the name or keyword is spelt differently from how you expect, or perhaps a letter or two was missed in the newspaper scanning process. 

A wildcard search allows you to search for terms with a variety of spellings. Simply replace a letter with a question mark or an asterisk. ? represents a single unknown character, while ?? represents two unknown characters. If you're not sure how many characters could be different, use an *, which represents multiple unknown characters. 

For example, to pick up multiple spellings of the name 'Steven', you could search: Ste*en or Ste??en. 

You can place the wildcard anywhere within a term - at the start, middle or end. They can be used multiple times in a term, for example, 'Ebe*z*r'. 

Findmypast's clipping tool makes it simple to save, collate and share your newspaper discoveries. Simply use the newspaper archive's built-in clipper to snip key articles and save high-quality images. 

As well as downloading them as image files, you can then share these clippings via a link (for example, to social media). You can also add your clippings to two of Findmypast's handy research tools:  

Collections  

These are unique compilations dedicated to a particular topic or project. They help you to keep your findings organised in the form of a personal online library. You can choose whether your Collections are private or publicly browsable, and you can even share them with family and friends. 

Workspaces 

Workspaces provide a way to store and organise your research outside of a family tree. Within the dedicated folders and sub-folders that you create, you can save newspaper clippings alongside records and your own notes.