How to Find Old Newspaper Articles Online....For Free

**Focus Your Research**

Think about what you want to search for. This may sound like a Big Duh!, but it pays to give some thought to the actual search terms you'll be using.

Say you're searching for news of your grandfather. If his name was Jedibiah Utzenpfeffer, you might have pretty good luck searching just on his name alone. But if grandpa's name was Robert Smith, you'll need some additional details -- like a town he lived in, his job, big event in his life, spouse's name -- in order to narrow down the results.

It also helps to use special search tools. If you want old newspaper articles on the sinking of the Titanic, for instance, a search on 'Titanic' may bring up tons of articles about the movie, rather than the actual event. But using Advanced Search features to focus results on the period prior to 1915 will bring up news articles about the actual sinking of the ship.

**Start With Google News Archives**

Head for Google News Archives and begin your search. Believe it or not, their collection of newspaper archives spans more than four centuries, and is a very rich resource.

You can use the Timeline feature to restrict your results to particular years. Their Advanced Search also lets you choose results from particular areas (nationally or internationally), or otherwise narrow down your search results.

Dear sameer, i want to add here, that the information abt the past events can also be searched from Wikipedia.com

and it also has refences to articles.....................