Philbincomeau Obituaries Honoring A Legacy Through Remembering

Writing Obituaries That Actually Honor Someone

I spent three years at a local newspaper handling death notices before moving into family history consulting. The first obituary I wrote by hand went to Mrs. Gable, a retired librarian who had donated over 400 books to the county system. Her family wanted me to mention her love of gardening, but the donation record was what stood out on paper. I led with the books. The garden got a single sentence near the end. The next day, her nephew called to say she would have approved. That moment taught me more about obituary writing than any textbook ever did. The process starts with gathering facts, but the real work happens after you have the dates and locations locked down. Most people collect birth certificates, marriage records, and a list of survivors. They stop there. That is where the piece goes flat. The survivors list is important for practical reasons, but it is not the story. The story is built from the gaps between the facts. What did this person do on a Tuesday morning? How did they treat the cashier at the grocery store? Why did they keep that old truck running for another ten years after it should have been scrapped?

Philbincomeau Obituaries Honoring A Legacy Through Remembering

I run a small archive project called Philbincomeau that has grown into something larger than I intended. We started by collecting digitized obituaries from rural counties in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The name came from a folding chair brand my grandmother used to sit on during family reunions. She said the chairs were sturdy, unglamorous, and lasted decades if you kept them out of the rain. That felt like a decent metaphor for what we are trying to do here. Archive the ordinary moments that outlast the people who lived them. The website lives at philbincomeau.org. It is free to access, though the hosting costs are real. We do not accept payment for listing obituaries. We do take donations if you want to support the server. The archive currently holds about 18,000 records dating back to 1923. Most are from families who submitted them themselves. Some came from microfilm rolls we digitized during a summer grant. A few were recovered from cemetery record databases when the original newspapers no longer had the space in print. Here is what most people get wrong when they write their own obituary or help a family member write one. They treat it like a resume. Education, employment, memberships, surviving relatives. All of that has its place. But a resume does not make anyone cry or remember something specific. The obituary needs concrete moments. My approach is to ask the family three questions and then write the piece around the answers.

1. What is one thing this person did that nobody else in the family would have done?
2. What is a habit or quirk that annoyed everyone but was also the thing everyone missed?
3. What would this person be complaining about right now if they were alive and standing in your kitchen?

The answers to those questions give you the spine of the piece. The facts fill in the ribs. I usually draft the first version the same evening the family gives me the information. Sometimes I hold it for a day. The waiting helps. You catch the sentence that sounds too polished, too much like something you would say to impress a stranger. Obituaries should sound like someone talking to other people who knew the deceased. Not a press release. I encountered a problem last October that I still think about. A family submitted an obituary for their father, a man who had worked as a long-haul trucker for forty-two years. The draft included his route numbers, his home terminals, and the mileage he claimed on his tax returns. It was accurate. It was also completely unreadable to anyone who was not in the industry. I rewrote the middle section to describe what he actually saw from the cab. The sunrise over the Salt Flats. The rain on the windshield during a storm outside Cheyenne. The way the diesel smell stuck to his jacket even after he took it off. The family said he would have laughed at the mileage stuff but loved the sunrise description. We ran that version. There are edge cases that trip people up regularly. When the deceased died under unclear circumstances, families sometimes ask if they should mention the cause. The legal answer varies by state. The practical answer is simpler. If the family does not bring it up, do not include it. The obituary is not a police report. If they do mention it, let them word it. Do not soften language they chose. Do not sharpen it either.

Another problem is the name sequence. Some families want every survivor listed. Some want only immediate family. A few want the ex-spouse listed before the current partner, which causes tension at the reading. I always ask the family to decide the order before I write. Once the order is set, I follow it exactly. I have never been asked to change the order after the piece ran. That speaks for itself.

The Technical Side Of Archiving Obituaries

If you are building a personal archive or helping a community group digitize records, start with the format decision. PDFs are common but painful to search. Plain text files are searchable but lose layout. My recommendation is HTML with embedded metadata. Each obituary gets its own file. The metadata block at the top includes the full name, dates, and source. Everything after that is the readable content. You can convert HTML to PDF later if you need a printable version. Converting the other way is much harder. Scanning physical copies requires a few ground rules. Use at least 300 DPI for text documents. 600 DPI is better if the paper is degraded or the ink is faint. Keep the scanner glass clean between passes. Dust shows up as gray blobs that look like spots on the original document unless you know what to look for. I use a soft lens cloth and a small amount of distilled water. Never use window cleaner on the glass. The ammonia eats the coating over time. Naming the files matters more than people realize. Use the format: lastname_firstname_year.txt. If you have multiple people with the same last name, add initials or birth year to differentiate. Philbincomeau uses a slightly different system because we deal with so many common surnames. Our format is lastname_firstname_birthyear_deathyear_source.txt. The source tag tells us where the record came from. That helps when the same person appears in two different county papers with slightly different details.

Backup strategy is the part everyone skips until something breaks. I suggest three copies. One on the local machine, one on an external drive, one in a cloud service. The external drive should be stored somewhere other than the desk drawer. Fire, flood, theft. The cloud copy does not need to be the full-resolution scans. The text versions are enough for recovery. Keep the scans on the external drive. The text versions are searchable and useful for quick lookup. Privacy is a consideration that applies even to historical records. Information about living family members should not be published without consent. Dates of birth for people who are still alive belong in the internal archive. They do not need to appear on the public-facing page. I learned this the hard way in 2022 when a family found their living daughter's graduation year listed on a scanned obituary from 1998. She was nineteen at the time. The family asked us to remove it. We did. The lesson was simple. Ancestor privacy extends to descendants until they are gone too.

Why People Keep Coming Back To The Archive

The feedback comes in sporadically. Most months I hear from one or two people. A few months I hear from none. Then something happens and the messages pile up. A woman in Nebraska found her grandfather's obituary in our collection. He had died in 1954. She said the details about his work at the grain elevator matched stories her father had told. It gave her something concrete to hold onto. A man in Iowa tracked down a cousin's military service record using the dates listed in an archived obituary. He said the national archives office had turned him away three times before he found the file on our site. I do not consider these outcomes proof that the project matters. I consider them evidence that the project works. There is a difference. Proof implies permanence. Evidence just means the system functions as intended. The work continues because people need access to records that are otherwise disappearing. Newspaper archives degrade. Microfilm fades. Family members pass away with boxes of clippings in their attics. The Philbincomeau archive is one attempt to slow that loss. It is not comprehensive. It will never be comprehensive. It covers areas where families have been willing to submit records and where local newspapers have allowed digitization. That is enough to make it useful. The download link for bulk access is available on the site for researchers. It requires a simple email request. We send a ZIP file containing the most recent quarterly collection. The file is usually between 800 MB and 1.2 GB depending on how many new records we added that season. Full-text search is not available for the bulk download. That feature lives on the website. If you need to find a specific name quickly, use the search tool. If you need the data for offline processing, request the bulk file. Both are free.

One counter-intuitive thing about obituary research is that the most useful records are often the ones with errors. Typos in names, wrong death dates, misspelled street names. These mistakes create alternative search paths. A researcher looking for "Robert Smith" who died in 1978 might never find the record under that spelling. But "Robt. Smythe" in a 1979 correction notice points directly to the original. I built a simple typo-tolerance feature into our search a while back. It did not help as much as I hoped. The manual review process catches more good results than automated suggestions ever will. The limitation I want to flag honestly is geographic coverage. We have strong representation in the Midwest. Southern California and the Pacific Northwest are underrepresented. The Northeast has sparse coverage outside of a few county partnerships. If you are researching ancestors from those regions, the archive will not be your primary resource. Start with local historical societies and state archive systems. Use Philbincomeau as a secondary check. It is better to have the information cross-referenced than to rely on a single source that may have gaps. I keep a running list of the problems we encounter during digitization. Paper that disintegrates when lifted from the frame. Ink that bleeds under scanner light. Faded typewriter ribbon that disappears entirely during scanning. The workaround for faded ribbon is often a combination of increased contrast and a second pass at a lower temperature setting. Some papers require a protective mesh screen to prevent the scanner glass from touching the document directly. It slows the workflow but preserves material that would otherwise crack along existing fold lines.

The archive will remain free as long as the hosting situation holds. Donation requests appear on the site but there is no payment wall for access. I do not plan to change that model. The value of the collection increases when more people can use it. Paywalls reduce usage. Reduced usage reduces the chance that someone will discover a record that changes how they understand their family history. That is not a transaction I am interested in. If you want to contribute records, the submission form is straightforward. Upload the scan or paste the text. Fill in the metadata fields. Include the source publication if you know it. If you do not know the source, leave it blank and add a note about where you found the record. We verify submissions against existing entries to avoid duplicates. The verification process usually takes three to five business days. You receive a confirmation email when the record goes live. If the submission is rejected, the email explains why. Common rejection reasons are missing dates, duplicate entries, or records that appear to be fictional rather than actual obituaries. The project started with approximately four hundred records. It has grown to eighteen thousand over six years. The growth rate has slowed slightly because the easy submissions have already been processed. The remaining backlog consists of fragmented records from counties with poor preservation practices. Those are harder to digitize and verify. The work continues at a manageable pace. It does not need to accelerate. Accuracy matters more than volume. I would rather have ten thousand verified records than twenty thousand questionable ones.

There is a practical benefit to building the archive slowly. Each additional record teaches you something about the population patterns in the region. Marriage records cluster around certain years. Death records spike during flu seasons and economic downturns. The patterns become visible when you have enough data to see them. That visibility improves the search features over time. Filters that seem arbitrary at first turn out to be useful once you understand what they are filtering for. The archive improves itself through incremental use. For anyone starting their own collection, the advice is simple and not particularly encouraging. Start small. Pick one county or one decade. Build a consistent naming convention. Verify each record before adding it to the main collection. Do not rush to publish. Rushing creates errors that take longer to fix than the initial work required. The Philbincomeau archive exists because we moved slowly at the beginning. The mistakes we made are mostly minor. The structural decisions held. That is the outcome to aim for, not speed. The site URL remains philbincomeau.org. The bulk download request form is linked from the homepage. Support is handled through a single contact email that I check daily. Response time is usually within forty-eight hours. The archive does not have a dedicated support team. It has one person who processes submissions, answers questions, and occasionally writes about the process when something interesting happens. That something is rare but worth documenting when it arrives.

I recently processed a submission from a woman in Tulsa who found her mother's obituary listed under her maiden name rather than her married name. The index did not cross-reference the two. She had to search both to confirm it was the same person. The record we added now includes both name variants in the metadata field. That kind of edge case happens often enough that I have added a separate column for alternate names. It increases the data entry time by about thirty seconds per record. It saves hours of search time for researchers who encounter the same situation. The technology behind the archive is unremarkable. It runs on shared hosting with a standard LAMP stack. The search interface uses basic full-text indexing with weighted ranking for exact name matches. There is no artificial intelligence involved. No predictive text. No pattern recognition. Just database queries and formatted output. That simplicity is intentional. Complex systems break. Simple systems degrade gracefully. The archive has been online for six years with two unplanned downtime events, both caused by the hosting provider rather than software failure. Those are the failures worth worrying about. They are outside your control. One final note about the submission process. If you are contributing records that you did not create yourself, make sure you have the right to share them. Copyright on obituaries is generally held by the publishing newspaper or the estate of the deceased. In practice, we rarely encounter enforcement actions. The risk is low but not zero. When in doubt, include a note in the submission explaining the source and your relationship to the record. That provides documentation if anyone asks questions later. Most people do not ask. It is better to have the explanation ready than to scramble for it after a request arrives.