Finding and Using Olean Times Herald Obituaries Effectively
The Olean Times Herald runs obituaries for Allegany County and the surrounding region in western New York. They've been doing this for decades. If you're looking to research a family member, verify a date, or just read about people from the area, these obituaries are one of the most useful local history resources you'll find. Here's how they work and what you need to know before you dig in. Obituaries in the Times Herald follow a standard format but can vary depending on who writes them. Most are submitted by funeral homes, though family members can submit them directly as well. The newspaper typically charges per line or per word, which means the length of the piece often depends on the budget. Shorter notices might just list survivors and service details. Longer ones include biographical sketches, career highlights, and personal anecdotes. Both types are useful, but they give you very different amounts of information to work with. To access them, the primary route is the Times Herald website at olean.com. They have a dedicated obituaries section where you can search by name, date range, or keyword. The site also archives past obituaries going back several years, sometimes longer. I've found that using the advanced search with specific dates narrows things down faster than a broad name search, which can return dozens of irrelevant results.
One practical problem I ran into recently was trying to track down an obituary for someone whose last name had a hyphen that the website didn't index properly. The search kept dropping results for the full hyphenated name. I got around it by searching only the first part of the surname plus the approximate death date, then scrolling through the results manually. It added maybe ten minutes to the process, but it saved me from hitting a dead end entirely. If you hit a similar wall, trying variations of the name or narrowing by year instead of exact date usually gets you past it. Beyond the website, microfilm copies of the paper are available through the Olean Public Library and the Allegany County Historical Society. Microfilm is worth checking if you're looking for something older than what the site archives. The online database probably goes back to the early 2000s at the latest, but the physical records stretch much further. You'll need to visit in person, and the equipment for reading microfilm is dated, but it works. I've spent afternoons going through reels and found entries that were never digitized, usually because the original was published before the paper switched to online-only archiving for certain sections. There are a few things people commonly get wrong when using these obituaries. One is assuming the information is always accurate. It isn't. Funeral homes prepare the copy, and while most do a decent job, typos happen, relationships get listed incorrectly, and dates can be off by a day or two. I once cross-referenced a birth date from an obituary with a census record and found it was off by three years. The funeral home had used a family-provided document that turned out to have an error. Always verify critical dates against official records if you're doing genealogical research.
Another thing to understand is what obituaries don't tell you. They rarely include full life histories. The format is constrained by cost and space. You'll get the essentials: name, age, date of death, surviving family, predeceased relatives, service details, and maybe a paragraph about where they lived or worked. If you need more detail, you'll have to look elsewhere. Census records, church registries, land deeds, and local histories at the historical society will fill in the gaps. The obituary is a starting point, not the end of your research. If you're doing this for a family history project, I'd recommend saving copies of everything you find. Screenshot the online version or print it to PDF. Websites change, links rot, and content gets moved around without warning. I lost several months of work when a third-party genealogy site reorganized its database and lost some of the obituary images I'd clipped from it. Having your own saved copies is cheap insurance. The bigger limitation of relying on the Times Herald obituaries is geographic coverage. They cover Olean and the immediate surrounding area well. But if your family was from a smaller town further out in Allegany County, the coverage might be spotty. Some smaller communities have their own publications or rely on the Times Herald for announcements, but not always consistently. If you're researching someone from a place like Belmont or Randolph, you might need to check local sources too. The Franklin D. Bouck Library in Salamanca has good regional holdings that complement the Times Herald archive.
Get the Full Details
For most people just trying to find a recent obituary, the online search is straightforward. Go to the obituaries page, enter the name, set the date range if you know it, and sort by relevance. Read through the results. If the person died recently, the obituary will likely still be active online. If it's been more than a few years, it might have moved into the archive section, so adjust your search accordingly. There's no cost to search the obituaries online. Some genealogy sites aggregate them and charge for access, but the Times Herald publishes them directly for free. Don't pay a middleman when you can go to the source. I've seen people pay for databases that offer the same content you can get by spending five minutes on the actual newspaper website. One advanced tactic that helps when you're researching a specific era is combining the obituary search with the newspaper's birth and marriage announcements. The Times Herald has run those for a long time, and they provide complementary data. A birth announcement gives you the parents' names and the exact date. An obituary from decades later confirms the person's death and lists their children. Put them together and you've got a solid skeletal timeline. Add census records and you've got something substantial.
The main takeaway is that these obituaries are a real resource for local history, but they have clear boundaries. They're not comprehensive for the whole county. They're not always perfectly accurate. They don't replace primary documents. But within their scope, they're reliable and freely accessible. Use them as part of a broader research strategy and they'll serve you well.
