How to Navigate the Quad City Times Obituaries Section Without Losing Your Mind
I spend way too much time reading through the Quad City Times obituaries. Not because it's morbid, but because people keep asking me how to actually use this resource. They come to me with blank stares after trying to search the site, then give up and go straight to Legacy.com or Ancestry. You don't need to do that. The QCT obituary page works fine once you stop treating it like a normal website search. Here's the straightforward path. Go to quadcitytimes.com and navigate to the Obituaries section. It's usually buried under the "News" or "Local" dropdown menu, or you can type "Quad City Times obituaries" directly into Google with the site qualifier: site:quadcitytimes.com obituaries. That Google trick alone gets you past most of the clutter. Once you're on the obituary listing page, there's a search bar at the top. You can filter by last name, date range, and sometimes by funeral home. This matters more than people realize because the QCT runs notices from multiple funeral homes and the filters actually work. I found this out the hard way back in 2019. My grandmother's cousin had passed, and I was trying to track down whether she'd filed a proper obituary with the Times or just a Facebook memorial. I searched by last name and got about 40 results. The thing is, the QCT obituary database at the time had a search quirk where common last names would return results sorted by publication date descending, but the date filter box was broken on mobile. I was on my phone, scrolling endlessly through results from 2023 when I was looking for someone who died in early 2019. Workaround: I opened the page on a desktop, used the date range filter manually, and also tried searching by the funeral home name. Her family used Kletz funeral home, so adding that to the search dropped it from 40 results to 3. Took me two minutes after that instead of 45.
The obituary pages themselves are worth paying attention to. The QCT runs two types of notices: the shorter death notices that are basically just family survival data and service times, and the full-length obituaries that have actual biographical content. Both are useful, but they serve different purposes. Death notices are fast reference. Full obituaries are where the real family history lives. I've pulled marriage dates, immigration stories, and military service details from QCT obituaries that didn't exist anywhere else online. A lot of the older generation in the Quad Cities area had their life summaries written up by the Times staff based on family submissions. Those write-ups often include details the family didn't even know to put in a genealogy database.
What Most People Miss About These Records
One thing that trips people up constantly: the QCT obituaries are organized by publication date, not by date of death. If someone died on a Saturday and the paper runs on Tuesday, the obituary appears under Tuesday's date. This seems minor until you're doing genealogical research and your death date doesn't match the record. Always check the actual text of the obituary for the date of passing. The publication date field in the search results will lie to you if you're not careful. Another thing: the QCT obituaries are not fully searchable by first name in their own database. I don't know why. Maybe it's a legacy system issue, maybe it's intentional. What I do know is that if you're looking for someone with a common first name and you only know the first name, you're going to have a rough time. I get around this by using Google's site-specific search with both names: site:quadcitytimes.com "John Smith" obituary. Google indexes the full text of the obituaries, including content that the QCT's own search might skip. This is how I found a death notice for an ancestor who went by a nickname that was different from his legal name on record. The QCT search engine matched the legal name only. There's also a paid archive component now. Free access used to cover about three months back, and I'm pretty sure it still covers at least a few months. Older records may require a subscription or a one-time fee through the Quad City Times archives. If you're doing serious research, this becomes a bottleneck pretty quickly. I've hit that wall more than once with mid-century records. The workaround is to cross-reference with the Rock Island County Public Library's local history section. They maintain physical and microfilmed copies of the QCT going back decades, and the librarians are genuinely helpful. Don't be shy about asking. I've had a reference librarian pull a 1972 microfilm reel for me in about ten minutes that would have taken me an hour to hunt through online.
Get the Full Details
Using Obituaries as Research Tools
Obituaries from the QCT are particularly useful if you're researching families in the Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, or East Moline areas. The Quad Cities is a tight-knit regional market, and a lot of multi-generational families stay within the corridor. That means you'll find siblings, cousins, and in-laws all published in the same obituary sections. A single obituary often lists surviving family members with their cities of residence, which gives you immediate leads for further research. The funeral home information is also consistently accurate. The QCT verifies these before publication. If you need to request a copy of the original submission or ask about arrangements, the funeral home listed on the obituary page is the right place to call. I've used this to obtain copies of burial records and cremation certificates that weren't available through any other channel. The funeral homes in the Quad Cities area tend to keep detailed files for several years, and they're cooperative when families reach out. One honest limitation: the QCT obituary database is not complete. Not every death in the Quad Cities area results in a published obituary. Some families choose not to publish. Some can't afford the cost, which runs roughly between $75 and $200 depending on length and whether you include a photo. There are also cases where the obituary gets submitted to a smaller publication like the Illinois Times or the Daily Journal instead. If you're doing thorough genealogical work, you should also check those outlets. The Mississippi Valley Historical Association maintains some supplemental death indexes that can fill gaps, though their coverage is spotty for anything after 1990.
If you just need to find out whether someone published an obituary in the QCT recently, the free search on their website will handle that in about two minutes. If you're building a family tree or doing serious local history research, plan for a longer process. The records are there. They're accessible. They're not perfect, but they're one of the better regional newspaper obituary collections in the Midwest if you know how to push past the interface quirks.
