Working With Local Newspaper Obituary Archives
I spent years helping people dig through Colorado Springs Gazette records for family research, and I learned pretty quickly that these collections are more useful than most people expect if you know how to approach them. The Gazette has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, and the collection includes everything from brief death notices to full paid memorial essays that ran for multiple days. The physical microfilm at the El Paso County Public Library is one thing. The online database through Gale newspapers is another entirely different beast. They don't always line up. I've had people waste hours searching the digital version only to find the actual notice exists on microfilm but wasn't digitized due to image quality or a microfilm reel swap that happened during a scanning project around 2014. Here is what actually works when you are trying to find and make sense of these records.
Remembering Beloved Gazette Colorado Springs Obituaries A Look Back At Lives Welllived
The search strategy matters more than most people realize. When you are using the Gale newspaper database, do not just type a full name and hit enter. The OCR on older Gazette issues from the 1970s through early 1990s has noticeable gaps. Names with hyphens, middle initials, or maiden names incorporated into the text often fail to index correctly. I routinely recommend searching by given name plus the word "died" or "passed" plus the county name. This pulls results that the exact name search misses entirely, though it generates more noise you have to wade through. Another thing nobody tells you about: the Gazette used a section header system called "Life Stories" in the 1990s for longer obituaries and "Death Notices" for the shorter legally required forms. These were in different physical sections of the paper on the same day. Some researchers assume they are looking in the wrong place because the database combines them into a single results stream. They are not in the wrong place. The interface just presents them together.
How to Actually Access the Archives
You have three real options here. The El Paso County Public Library on Tejon Street has the complete physical run going back to 1859. Their staff is knowledgeable and will help you locate a specific date range, though they cannot browse every issue for you. You need the exact date, approximate age of the deceased, and preferably a middle initial. Going in unprepared means you will be rolling microfilm for twenty minutes before finding anything useful. Option two is the Gale database through library subscriptions. Many public libraries in the Denver metro area and Colorado Springs include this in their free research packages. If your local library does not, you can sometimes access it through a university affiliation or pay a small fee. The search interface changed their layout in 2023, so older video tutorials online are somewhat outdated now. The basic functionality remains the same though. Option three is FamilySearch, which has indexed portions of the Colorado Springs Gazette obituary collection. The indexing is incomplete, and the data quality is variable. I use it as a starting point, not an endpoint. It is free and fast for casting a wide net, but you should plan to verify whatever you find there against the primary source.
Get the Full Details
What to Expect and What Falls Apart
The most common problem I see is people assuming the obituary contains complete biographical data. It rarely does. A standard Gazette obituary from the 1980s might give you a name, age, surviving family members, and where the service was held. It might not mention your ancestor's military service, their place of birth, or their occupation unless the family specifically requested those details and paid for a longer notice. The paid ad rates scale with length, so shorter notices were economically normal. Another limitation: the Gazette changed its indexing practices around 2005. Notices before that year are indexed by the newspaper's internal staff. Notices after are sometimes user submitted or processed differently. The search results quality varies noticeably between these two eras. Pre-2005 entries tend to have better metadata attached. Post-2005 entries sometimes have OCR errors that corrupt the index fields entirely, especially with names containing uncommon characters or non-standard spellings. I ran into a specific edge case last year involving a woman named "Margaret-Ann Foster" whose obituary appeared in the Gazette on March 14, 1987. Her name was indexed as "Margaret Ann Foster" in the digital database, which meant an exact name search failed. I found it by searching for "Foster" combined with the date range and the word "Colorado Springs." Once I located the microfilm page, the hyphen was clearly visible. The database simply stripped it during OCR processing. This is not unusual. Double-barrelled first names and hyphenated surnames are consistently problematic in these older newspaper archives.
Practical Steps That Actually Help
Start with the death certificate from the Colorado Department of Health and Human Services if you have any reason to believe the Gazette notice might be incomplete or inaccurate. The death certificate gives you the exact legal name, date of death, and usually the informant's name, which is often a close relative. That informant name can unlock the family connections that the obituary only hints at. The application takes about ten business days and costs the current fee. I always recommend getting this before spending significant time in the newspaper archives because it anchors everything else. When you are in the Gazette database, export or photograph every relevant result. The databases can change their retention policies, and pages occasionally go offline without notice. I have seen three major runs of the Gazette digitization disappear from accessible databases in the past five years alone due to licensing renegotiations. Having your own copy means you are not starting over if that happens. Cross reference the obituary details with city directory records from the same era. The Gazette sometimes published companion listings or society pages that contain additional context about the family's address, church affiliation, or organizational memberships. These companion pieces are easy to miss because they appear on different pages than the death notice itself, but they can fill in gaps that the obituary alone leaves open.
The collection is valuable and underutilized by people who do not understand its quirks. It will not give you everything you want, and it will misindex certain names regularly. But with the right approach and realistic expectations, it yields useful information consistently.
