Guide to Using the Historical South Carolina Newspapers Database

Search this site to find

• information on persons, places, or events;
• specific topics or news of the day;
• concepts or ideas;
• unique passages of text, such as the source of a frequently-quoted phrase.

Users have the option of performing basic or advanced searches. The basic search box is located on the home page. Basic search options are limited to state, time period, and key words located near each other.

For basic searches, results listed first are most likely to be relevant to your search. Results will appear higher in the list when they contain

• exact matches of your search terms;
• more of your search terms;
• repeated search terms;
• search terms that occur near each other.

Your searches will yield better results if you keep the following points in mind:

• Common words such as and, not, and the are ignored by the search engine.
• Case of letters is ignored. For example, Civil and civil are treated the same.
• Diacritic characters (accent marks, in non-English text) and other special characters produce inaccurate results, so plain (unaccented) letters should be substituted for letters with diacritics.

This site's search engine utilizes language-specific dictionaries to include word variants for your search terms. This is often called stemming. For example, the search term house, when stemmed in English, would also return words like houses and housing.

For more search options, see Advanced Search Help.