Finding Old Records at the World-Herald
I spent three years helping people track down their grandparents' deaths notices when the family wasn't sure which paper they appeared in. Most of them ended up at the Omaha World Herald. It's not complicated, but there are a few quirks that trip people up if you don't know them beforehand. The site lives at omahaworldherald.com under the obituaries section. You can search by name, date range, and location. The basic search works fine for recent deaths. Anything after 2010 usually comes back with the full text or a link to the PDF. Older stuff gets sketchy. Here's the part nobody mentions: the archive search has a cutoff. Free searches go back to about 2007 or so, but the full digitized records require a paid subscription through their parent company, Project Gutenberg's partner. I don't remember the exact price, but it's not cheap if you're doing a one-off search. Sometimes it's cheaper to just call the paper directly. They charge a small fee per record look-up, but for a single obit it saves you from buying a monthly pass.
I once spent forty minutes searching for a man named Robert Mueller. Three hundred people with that name live in the metro area. The search engine defaulted to the most popular matches first, so the guy we wanted was buried on page eight of results. I stopped using the automated search after that. Now I narrow it down by death date first, then cross-reference with the funeral home listing. The World Herald publishes the funeral home contact info alongside the obit, which is actually useful because you can call them directly and ask if they have a copy of the full printed version. The PDF archives are where most people get stuck. The digital versions sometimes have poor OCR quality, especially for pre-2015 entries. Letters get turned into numbers, dates get garbled. If you need something precise for legal or genealogical purposes, don't trust the OCR. Request a scanned image of the original page instead. The paper will email you a low-resolution version for free, or you can pay for a high-res scan. Takes about two business days. One thing worth noting: the World Herald merged with the Omaha Sun's archive a while back, so some older black newspaper obituaries show up in their results even though they weren't originally published in the white paper. It's actually helpful if you're doing comprehensive research, but it also means your search results will include material from multiple sources without clear labeling. You have to check the publication date and source line to figure out what you're looking at.
If you're only looking for deaths from the last five years, just use the online search. It's fast and accurate enough. For anything older, or if you need documentation for a legal matter, call the obituary desk at the World Herald directly. They're used to these calls and can pull the record faster than you'll find it yourself. The number is listed on their contact page. Don't expect a quick answer during holiday weeks — staffing drops and turnaround time stretches to a week or more.
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