Why I Started Archiving Courier & Press Obituaries
I've been tracking down old Evansville obituaries for about seven years now, mostly because people kept asking me where they could find full text copies of notices that had long since been pulled from the newspaper's website. The Courier & Press has a solid digital archive going back to 1996, but anything before that exists in fragmented form across microfilm, donated scrapbooks, and the occasional digitized PDF someone uploaded to FamilySearch. What people really want is a clean, searchable collection that doesn't require a library card or a research appointment. The gap between what exists and what's actually accessible is where most people get stuck. I spent months figuring out the right workflow, and what follows is basically the system I use now. It's not glamorous. It works, though.
Preserving The Legacy Courier And Press Obituaries As A Tribute To Evansvilles Citizens
Here's the straightforward process I recommend. First, establish where your source material lives. The Vanderburgh County Public Library has microfilm readers on-site, and the Courier & Press archives are also available through Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, though the latter two only cover certain date ranges in full text. For the deepest cuts, you'll often need to cross-reference at least two sources because local obituaries from the 1970s and earlier sometimes ran under different section placements or with missing attributions. Step one: Gather your sources and note their limitations. Ancestry might have the full obituary text for a 1985 issue, but the paper's own archive may carry an expanded version that includes service details the subscription platform trimmed out. Always pull both. I learned this the hard way when researching a family line in 2019. A cousin sent me a screenshot of a 1972 obituary from Ancestry that listed the deceased's maiden name as "Roth." I later viewed the original microfilm at the library and found the actual paper used "Roeth" — a subtle difference that matters when you're searching public records or cemetery databases, since both spellings were used by the family over different decades. That single correction prevented me from chasing dead ends for months. Step two: Digitize everything yourself if you can. If you have access to a scanner, use it. Most home scanners will produce acceptable results at 300 DPI for obituary pages. If you're working from microfilm, the library readers have built-in cameras in some branches, but the image quality is inconsistent. My workaround was to photograph the microfilm screen with a decent phone camera in a darkened room, using manual focus and turning off any auto-enhance features. It sounds rough, but I've found that consistent manual exposure actually produces more readable text than the library's built-in capture, which tends to blow out the highlights on older, yellowed film. Save every file as a PDF with OCR enabled — Google Drive's OCR or Adobe Acrobat both handle this well. Don't skip the OCR step. It makes the text searchable, which is the whole point of preserving these in the first place.
Step three: Build a simple index. A spreadsheet with columns for full name, date of death, newspaper date, page number, source URL or microfilm roll number, and a link to the digitized file is enough. I use Airtable because it lets me tag entries and filter by date range without turning into a mess, but a basic Google Sheet works fine too. The key is getting the newspaper date right. Obits are almost always published one to three days after the death, and confusing the two dates will throw off anyone trying to verify the information against birth/death records. Step four: Store the files somewhere persistent. Don't rely on a single cloud service. I keep my master collection on an external hard drive and sync it to both Google Drive and an archive.org collection. The Wayback Machine can preserve web-based obituaries from the Courier & Press site before they disappear into paywall zones or editorial purges, so I occasionally snapshot any URLs I add to the index. It takes about thirty seconds per entry and is worth the time. The main downside to this approach is time. A single obituary from the print era typically takes ten to fifteen minutes to locate, verify across sources, digitize, OCR, and catalog. For someone building a comprehensive archive of Evansville obituaries spanning decades, that adds up fast. I estimated about eight hours of work per hundred obituaries once you're efficient with the workflow. Before that, when I was still figuring things out, it was closer to twenty. The bottleneck is always source verification. You can digitize quickly, but you cannot reliably verify an obituary's content without checking at least two references, and those references are scattered across subscription platforms, physical archives, and volunteer-maintained databases.
Get the Full Details
Another practical limitation is that not everything is available. Pre-1950 obituaries from the Courier & Press are sparse in digital form. Some rolls of microfilm were damaged or never duplicated. I've hit several streets in my research where the paper simply didn't carry an obituary for a person who died in Evansville that week — likely because the family chose a different publication or arranged for notice elsewhere. Recognizing when a source gap is real versus just a search problem saves a lot of frustration. Try searching the Evansville Star Journal and the Messenger newspapers in addition to the Courier & Press. Many families published in multiple outlets, and the alternate paper might have the fuller notice. If you're looking to do this on a larger scale, consider partnering with the Vanderburgh Public Library's genealogy desk. They've been digitizing local obituaries for years and are generally receptive to outside contributors who bring organized, properly sourced material. A collaborative approach cuts the time investment significantly and ensures the collection survives beyond any one person's hard drives.
