Your ancestors didn't have to be headlines for you to find value in Ancestry.com's Historical Newspaper Collection <www.ancestry.com >. Boasting more than 3 million pages from newspapers across the United States (plus two papers from England and one from Canada), this collection is one of the largest of its kind — and growing. By year's end, about 10 million pages from newspapers dating as far back as the 1700s will be online. Most of the collection's newspaper titles are American, but Ancestry.com also has digitized pages from Canada's Manitoba Daily Free Press, plus London's Daily Universal Register and The Times (other Canadian and British titles will be added soon). You can search the entire collection or specific newspapers by entering a combination of terms in the name, location, date and keyword search boxes. Keep in mind that the number of digitized newspapers for each locale varies. For example, Ohio has more than 40 titles online, whereas a few states, such as Oregon, haven't entered the system yet.

Because the newspaper pages are displayed as images, they're searched using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The system searches for text that is optically similar to your keywords. OCR makes it possible to search millions of images, but it's not as accurate as a text-based index. That means it may return results that differ from your search terms (although I didn't encounter this problem).

The search box has several options you might not notice at first glance. The fields prompt users to enter first and last names, but you can enter any two words in those boxes, such as Kansas and City, or President and Lincoln. This strategy works because the system looks for instances where your search terms appear within one word of each other.