Getting Your Obituary Records Right Without Losing Your Mind
I deal with the Record Argus obituary archive pretty regularly. The basic process is straightforward once you know where the actual bottlenecks are. The website lets you search by name, date range, and location, which sounds simple enough, but the search algorithm has some quirks that trip people up constantly. You will waste hours if you treat it like a modern database search. The archive covers records going back to around 1997 in digitized form, though the physical paper archives go back much further. If you are researching something pre-1997, you are looking at either visiting the courthouse in person or requesting a scan through the local historical society, and honestly, the turnaround on those requests is anywhere from two to six weeks depending on staffing. Here is the workflow I actually use. I start by pulling the full name and approximate death date from whatever source material I have. Then I run a search on the Record Argus site with the surname and a two-year window. Most people narrow it too much and miss entries where the death date and publication date don't align perfectly due to weekly print schedules. Obituaries often appear two to four days after the actual passing, sometimes longer if the family requested a delay.
Once you find the right entry, the digitized image is usually a PDF of the original page. This is where things get tricky. The resolution on some of these scans is barely adequate for reading small print, and the OCR text that comes with them is notoriously unreliable, especially with older handwritten names or typewriter fonts. I always go straight to the image and read it myself rather than trusting the text version. I ran into a real problem last year with a client researching an ancestor named Kuzmick. The automated search kept pulling up a completely different person because the OCR had misread the "K" as a "G", giving us a "Guzmick" hit. I ended up having to manually browse through every issue from 2003 to 2006 in the October through December run. That took about four hours. My workaround was to abandon the name search entirely and instead search by the known death date, then manually review each day's listing. Once you know the approximate publication date, browsing the specific week saves you from the OCR errors that make name searches so unreliable. When you pull an obituary, there are a few things most people overlook. The survivor list is usually the most useful genealogical data point in there, and it is often more complete than what you will find in any census record. The parents listed, siblings, children, and sometimes even grandchildren by name. I have found more accurate birth dates from obituary age statements than from the actual birth certificates my clients brought me, because the obituaries were written by family members who had the information fresh.
Another thing that trips people up is the publication frequency. The Record Argus runs certain obituaries in both the daily edition and a Sunday compilation, meaning the same obituary can appear twice in different formats. The Sunday version sometimes includes additional information that the daily version cut for space, particularly funeral home details or church service information. If you only grab the first result you see, you may be missing half the content. The cost situation is worth understanding before you start. The site charges per page download, and a typical obituary runs anywhere from half a page to a full page. A single obituary download will run you about two to three dollars. If you are doing deep research, you will go through dozens of these, and the charges add up fast. I usually recommend downloading everything you think you might need in one session rather than coming back later, because the page interface doesn't save your cart across sessions and you will lose your place if you step away. There are legitimate limitations to keep in mind. The digitization is not complete, and there are gaps, particularly in the 2008 to 2012 period where some issues seem to have been scanned at lower quality or are missing entirely from the database. I have searched for multiple obituaries from that window and simply could not find them, even though I knew they had been published. The newspaper eventually apologized and said some archives were lost during a server migration, but there was never a public list of which dates are affected.
Get the Full Details
Another hard limitation is that not everyone who dies in the coverage area gets an obituary in the Record Argus. The paper focuses on certain communities within its circulation area, and residents in outlying towns sometimes get placed in neighboring publications. If you are researching a family that lived on the edge of the coverage zone, you should also check the Alton Telegraph and the Belleville News-Democrat archives. Those papers serve overlapping communities and have their own search quirks. For anyone doing serious genealogical work, I recommend downloading the full page the obituary appears on rather than just the obituary snippet. The surrounding ads and community notices often contain useful information, particularly real estate listings that can confirm addresses and church announcements that can help establish family connections in the area. It takes extra time per download but it pays off when you are trying to place a family in a specific neighborhood or congregation. One final thing that nobody warns you about: the name variants. People changed their names, went by nicknames, or were listed under a maiden name in the obituary while knowing them by a married name. I spent three weeks chasing a woman who was listed as Margaret Ann Kowalski in the obituary but whom everyone called Peggy Miller. The search for Miller came up empty until I tried the middle name and the maiden name together. Always search using every name variant you can find, including middle names and known nicknames, before you assume the record doesn't exist.
