Why Reading Old Obituaries Is an Exercise in Patience
The Saskatoon Star Phoenix has been publishing obituaries for longer than most current subscribers have been alive. If you have ever tried to track down a death notice from the 1980s or earlier, you already know that the process is slow and occasionally maddening. I spent roughly three weeks last year locating a single obituary for a great aunt who passed in 1974. The digital archive is useful but it has gaps. The paper records are scattered across microfilm and a handful of bound volumes that some people still treat like religious artifacts. Before you start digging, understand what you are actually looking for. The Phoenix obituary section covers funeral announcements, biographical sketches, and sometimes full newspaper articles for notable residents. The depth of coverage depends heavily on the person's profile. A local judge or businessman might get a full page spread. A retired factory worker from Nutana might get three paragraphs and a listing of surviving family members. Both are valuable. Both are hard to find if you do not know where to look. The most efficient starting point is the Phoenix's own digital archive at saskatoonstarphoenix.com. They have been digitizing back issues for years. As of my last check, coverage extends roughly to the late 1990s online. Earlier material lives on microfilm at the Saskatoon Public Library's Central Branch. The library staff there are generally helpful but they work with very old equipment and you will often be placed on a waitlist. Budget at least forty five minutes per roll of microfilm, sometimes longer if the machine is temperamental.
I ran into a specific problem while researching a family connection to the 1963 Saskatchewan flood. The obituary I needed listed a church funeral but the digital index had the wrong date attached. The death occurred in late March but the service was listed under April due to a typesetting error in the original publication. I cross-referenced the census record through Library and Archives Canada to nail down the actual date of death, then went straight to the physical microfilm. Going directly to the original publication saved me two days of chasing false leads in the searchable database. There are tricks that most people miss when they start this work. The first is that obituaries were not always filed under the deceased person's surname in the index. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Phoenix sometimes indexed by the name of the funeral home that arranged the service or by the spouse's name if the deceased was a married woman. If you cannot find an entry under Mary Thompson, try Mary Brown or try searching for Hupy Funeral Directors as a keyword. It sounds archaic but the filing system was inconsistent for decades. A second counter-intuitive detail is that many obituaries from before 1980 were not written by the family at all. They were drafted by the newspaper staff using notes from the funeral director. This means the language can be surprisingly formal or oddly narrow in scope. A neighbor once told me her mother's 1967 obituary mentioned her prize-winning dahlias but completely omitted that she had survived two children and a grandchild. The funeral home had only provided a basic family list and the reporter filled in the rest from a brief phone call. Always check surrounding articles in the same issue. Sometimes the fuller biography appeared in a nearby column or community notice.
If you want to preserve what you find, do not rely on the microfilm images alone. Scan or photograph the relevant pages directly. Microfilm degrades over time and the Library may re-catalog their collection at any point. I keep a folder of personally scanned obituary pages because I have watched the Phoenix's own digitization project drop certain issues from their website without warning. In 2019 they removed a chunk of the early 2000s archive temporarily and several researchers lost access to material that had been online for years. Another resource most people overlook is the Saskatchewan Genealogy Society. They maintain a separate index ofPrairie obituaries that sometimes includes entries the Phoenix did not capture in their main run. Their volunteer transcribers have also caught errors in the official newspaper indexes. The membership fee is reasonable and the database is searchable by date range and location. It will not replace the primary source but it cuts down on blind alleys significantly. The honest part of this is that you will hit dead ends. Some obituaries simply do not exist in any accessible format. The Phoenix had periods where the obituary section was handled by a regional office and the local files were discarded during building renovations in the early 1990s. If a person died in Saskatoon but was living in one of the surrounding rural municipalities, their notice may have run in the Eastview News or the Lake Sky reporter instead. I found an uncle's obituary that way after spending two days looking in the Phoenix archive for something that had never been there.
Get the Full Details
The effort is worth it but it requires you to slow down and accept that most searches will take longer than you expect. Factor in at least a week of research time for a single obituary from before 1975. Plan for multiple trips to the library. Keep notes in a spreadsheet with columns for date, volume number, microfilm reel, and where the physical copy is stored. Your future self will thank you when you need to revisit the same notice six months later.
