Finding and Reading Pittsburgh Newspaper Obituaries: A Practical Guide
Pittsburgh's major newspapers have published obituaries for well over a century, and they remain one of the most reliable ways to trace family history in Western Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review are the two big ones, but you should also know about the smaller ethnic and community papers that ran obits for neighborhoods that don't always show up in the mainstream records. This is exactly what Pittsburgh Newspaper Obits Honoring Lives Preserving History In The Steel City is all about. People in this area tended to live long lives, work the same jobs for decades, and stay connected to the same churches and union halls, which means their obituaries often contain more information than you'd get in a lot of other cities. The obituary section itself is not something you just stumble into if you're looking for a specific person who died twenty or thirty years ago. The Post-Gazette keeps online archives going back quite a few years, and the Tribune-Review has their own digital run, but there are gaps. The Tribune-Review went through ownership changes and a period where they stopped printing the Thursday edition entirely, so there are some months in the late 2000s that are harder to track down online. You will find older material mostly through microfilm or through the historical collections at the Pittsburgh branch of the Carnegie Library system on Sixth Street. They have the full runs, and the microfilm readers actually work, though you will be fighting with focus knobs and light bulbs that have been on since 1974. I spent an afternoon last year looking for a great-uncle who died in 1988. His name was listed in the Post-Gazette index under a slightly misspelled version of his actual last name. The newspaper office had transcribed the data by hand at some point, and whoever keyed it in swapped an 'r' and a 'l'. I found him by searching for his wife's maiden name instead, which was printed correctly in the same column. That kind of error is not unusual. You should always have alternate search terms ready when you are doing this work. Maiden names, nicknames, variations on neighborhood street names, and the names of the funeral homes that handled arrangements all tend to appear in obits and can serve as backup entry points.
Where the Records Actually Live
The Post-Gazette is owned by Digital First Media, which also operates a lot of other regional papers across the country. Their archive system is a commercial product called NewsBank, and if you have a library card from Allegheny County, you can get remote access to it through the library's website. The Tribune-Review's archive is similarly behind a paywall, but the library connection usually covers it. This is important because it means you do not need to drive downtown every time you want to look something up. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's digital resources page lists both of these, along with a few smaller databases that are worth knowing about. The smaller papers are where things get interesting if you are researching a family with roots in specific neighborhoods. The Polish Tribune ran obituaries for the Hill District and Polish communities going back decades. There were Italian-language pages in the Trib for a long time. The Jewish Light covered that community. If your ancestor lived in Lawrenceville, Homewood, or Brookline, the local community weeklies sometimes picked up obits that the big papers either summarized briefly or skipped entirely. These papers are not always digitized. Some exist only on microfilm at the library or in private collections, and a few are held by ethnic societies and church archives. You will occasionally find a complete run of the Old German Baptist Brethren publications stored in a basement somewhere off Route 30.
What to Expect Inside These Obituaries
A Pittsburgh steelworker's obituary from the 1960s through the 1980s will almost always mention the specific plant where they worked. US Steel had sites in Braddock, Clairton, and Homestead. Bethlehem Steel operated in South Boston and had a major presence in the area too. Jones and Laughlin had their main facility in Point Breeze. The plant name, the department, and sometimes the number of years worked there are all standard inclusions. This level of detail is useful because it pins down an ancestor's economic situation and social network. People who worked the same shift at the same mill for thirty years tended to form tight communities that extended well past the factory gate. Their obituaries often list surviving friends from the union local or the VFW hall, not just immediate family. Religious affiliation is another common detail. Pittsburgh has a dense network of parishes, and many families stayed with the same church for generations. The Catholic archdiocese has thousands of records, and the obituary will typically name the parish where the service was held. This matters because the parish registers themselves may contain baptismal records, marriage certificates, and confirmation dates that predate what you can find in civil records. If the obituary says someone was a member of St. Josaphat's on East Carson Street, that is a concrete lead. The parish office may still have files, or at the very least you know which diocesan archive to contact.
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Common Problems and How to Work Around Them
The biggest issue people run into is that obituary indexing is inconsistent. The Post-Gazette transitioned to digital-only publishing for many of its sections, and the older print indexes were not all digitized with the same care. Some names are missing from the online index entirely. My workaround for this was to search by date range instead. I would pull the week's issues from the microfilm reader and scan the obituary page manually. It takes longer, but it catches everything. You can also use the library's genealogy reference staff. They are not going to do the research for you, but they know which databases have what, and they can point you toward the right reel of microfilm if you tell them the approximate date and neighborhood. Another problem is that funeral home websites sometimes republish old obituaries with edited content. The version you find on a site like Gibson Funeral Home or Prentice-Faulkner Communities may have been trimmed for space or altered over time. Always cross-reference with the original newspaper version if you can find it. The newspaper text is the primary source. The funeral home copy is secondary and was often prepared by the family under time pressure, which means typos and incomplete information are more common than you would expect.
Limitations You Should Know About
Not everyone who died in Pittsburgh is in the newspaper obituary section. People who died in hospitals outside the city, in state facilities, or in nursing homes in neighboring counties may only have a death certificate on file and no newspaper notice at all. Indigent funerals handled by the county do not always generate obituaries. There is also a significant gap for people who died during the height of the steel industry closures in the early 1980s, when economic hardship meant that some families could not afford the standard newspaper placement. These omissions are not unique to Pittsburgh, but they are worth keeping in mind if your search comes up empty. The Allegheny County coroner's records and the state death certificates are your next step when the newspapers do not cooperate. Online databases like Ancestry and Fold3 do have some Pittsburgh obituary collections, but they are incomplete. Ancestry's "Pennsylvania, U.S., Obituary Collection" includes material from several Pittsburgh papers, but the coverage is spotty and the OCR quality varies. You should treat these as supplemental tools rather than primary sources. The best results come from combining the newspaper archives with the library's microfilm collection and the county death records. No single source will give you everything, but together they cover the vast majority of cases.
