The NY State Historical Newspapers is a website that contains about 3,700,000 newspaper pages scanned by libraries throughout the state. At one time each region in NY State had their own website but now they all have been combined. Best of all it is absolutely free.
From the main page you can click on a county to see what newspaper and dates are available. This is the website that I use each week to select the “Old News” postings. The reason I use this website is that you can search by a date range. Then I can save a page either as a PDF or PNG picture file that I can save to my computer and edit as I do with the old ads.
The video, below, explains how to do a search on the website.
Thanks! This is a fun site to explore. I found information about an extended family member, and where his family came from in Ireland in the early 1800’s.