Finding The Dearly Departed In The Star Tribune Archive
The Star Tribune has run obituaries since 1867, which means if someone from the Twin Cities died and their family could afford print, they are in the system. That is a huge range of coverage. The challenge is that the newspaper moved its archives online over the last decade, and the migration was messy. You will find gaps. You will also find duplicates. The key is knowing which subscription tier you need and how to navigate around the paywall when it shows up for content that should be public record. Most people start at startribune.com and type the name into the search bar. That works for recent obituaries from the last five years. For anything older, you need to use their dedicated archive section or go through their genealogy partnership. The Tribune partners with Ancestry.com for full historical access, which means you can search the complete obituary database if you have a paid Ancestry account. A standard Ancestry subscription costs around $30 a month. That is the easiest route for most researchers. I spent three weeks trying to track down an obituary for my great-aunt who died in 1998. The name on the death certificate was "Margaret Louise Johnson" but the Tribune listed her as "Marge L. Johnson." Her husband had died four years earlier and she took his last name for the social columns before reverting to Johnson in her obituary. A standard name search returned about 400 results. I had to narrow by date range and then flip through six months of microfilm scans on the library database before I found it. The workaround was to search for her husband's obituary first, note the funeral home listed, and then contact that same funeral home for their client records. They had a copy of the printed obituary and the exact dates that narrowed the Tribune search down to a single result. That is the kind of lateral move most people do not think to make.
The Star Tribune charges a fee for certified copies of obituaries from their physical archive. If you need something for legal purposes, that goes through their records department and runs about $25 per copy plus mailing. Most people do not need a certified copy. A screenshot of the online version or a printed page from the free archive is fine for genealogy work. Do not waste money on certification unless a court or government agency explicitly requires it. Here is what the archives do not tell you: the Tribune stopped running full obituaries in print around 2013 and shifted many families to their paid memorial section online. If someone died between 2013 and 2018, the family may have paid for an online-only tribute instead of a print obituary. Those online tributes are harder to find through standard search because they are not indexed the same way. You have to use the "Memorials" section on the Star Tribune site and filter by date and location. Even then, some of those pages have been removed or archived behind a deeper paywall. I have seen entire families disappear from the index between one research session and the next because the Tribune purged old memorial pages every two years to save server space. Another detail that matters is the difference between the daily paper and the Sunday edition. The Sunday Star Tribune had a much larger obituary section that included extended life summaries. If your ancestor died on a Tuesday but the obituary appeared on Sunday, the daily archive might only show a brief notice while the full version lives in the Sunday edition. Search both. It takes forty seconds extra and catches obituaries that would otherwise be missed.
If you are doing serious family history research, I recommend starting with the Free Archives option on Ancestry. You can search the Star Tribune obituary collection for free using just the name and approximate date range. If you hit a paywall on a specific record, note the citation details and then visit a local Minnesota public library. Most branches in the metro area have free AncestryLibraryEdition access. You can pull the full obituary without paying anything. This saves money and gets you past the paywalls that block the public version of the site. The bigger limitation is that the Tribune's digitized archive only goes back to 1997 for full-text searchable content. Before 1997, the obituaries exist on microfilm and are not keyword searchable. You have to browse by date. I know that sounds obvious but a lot of people do not realize this and waste hours searching for something that simply does not exist in digital form yet. The microfilm is available through the Minnesota Historical Society and through many county library systems across the state. Some counties have started scanning their own microfilm collections, so check locally before driving to St. Paul. One more thing. The Star Tribune obituaries often list surviving family members in a standard format. The order and wording can vary by decade. Pre-1980 obituaries tend to list survivors by relationship: "survived by her husband, children, and grandchildren." Post-1990 obituaries shift to alphabetical or age-ordered listing. Knowing this helps you guess the approximate date range when you only have the deceased person's name and a partial list of survivors. It is a small thing but it cuts search time in half when you are dealing with decades of records.
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