How to Access and Preserve Kokomo Tribune Obituary Archives
The Kokomo Tribune has been publishing obituaries for well over a century. If you are looking to access these records for genealogical research or personal interest, there are a few practical steps and complications you need to know about before you start digging. The Tribune's obituary database lives behind their paywall now, which is the standard move most regional newspapers made after 2018. You can search the archive through their website, but you will need a digital subscription. The free tier used to give you limited access, but that got trimmed pretty aggressively. A subscription runs roughly eleven to fourteen dollars a month depending on which package they are running that quarter. Before you pay for anything, go to the Howard County Public Library. They have a microfilm collection of the Tribune that covers decades before anything went fully digital. I spent an afternoon there a few years ago trying to track down my grandmother's aunt, who died in 1962. The microfilm reader at the library only had rolls up to about 1995, and the card catalog was organized by date, not by name. Finding a specific obituary meant knowing roughly when the person died. I ended up using a combination of the Indiana Death Index and a funeral home website to narrow the date range, then went back to the library with that information. Took about twenty minutes once I had the right date instead of wandering through reels for two hours.
There is also the issue of what actually gets preserved. Not every person who dies in Howard County gets an obituary in the Tribune. Some families opt for the Kokomo Times, some go straight to Cremation Services, some put announcements only in the church newsletter. If you are doing family history research, checking only one publication will leave gaps. I learned that the hard way when my great uncle's death notice was in the Times because his brother owned a printing shop there and had connections. The Tribune had nothing.
What You Will Actually Find
The early obituaries, pre-1970s, are usually shorter. They list the deceased, surviving family, funeral arrangements, and a brief note about where the person worked or which church they attended. That is it. No long biographical essays. The trend toward longer, more detailed obituaries started in the late nineties when newspapers began charging per line or per word. Families started padding them to get more content for their money, and then readers expected that level of detail. It changed the whole nature of what these records capture. If you are looking for specific data points like maiden names, birth dates, or military service, those tend to appear consistently. What tends to be missing is cause of death, neighborhood where they lived, and sometimes even the full name of a surviving spouse if the family requested privacy. I ran into this when researching a cousin who died in 1981. The obituary mentioned a surviving husband but used only his first name. Cross-referencing with a 1980 census record was the only way to confirm his full name and where they lived on the east side of Kokomo.
Get the Full Details
Practical Steps for Access
Start with the Indiana State Library's Digital Library of Indiana. They have someIndexed obituary content from the Tribune that may be searchable without a subscription. It is not complete, but it covers certain years and certain sections more thoroughly than the newspaper's own archive does. The indexing quality varies because it was mostly OCR'd from print, so typos in the original get locked in. Search variations matter more than you would expect. The Find a Grave and BillionGraves projects also have photos of that sometimes include the newspaper source cited by the family. This is surprisingly useful because it can point you to the exact date and page of an obituary that is otherwise buried in a paywalled archive. I found three obituaries this way that I never would have located through a direct newspaper search. If you go the subscription route, use a browser extension that blocks tracking scripts and consider setting up a calendar reminder to cancel before the next billing cycle if you are only doing a one-time research project. The Tribune does not always make cancellation easy to find on their site. You have to dig into the account settings, not the main menu. I wasted about ten minutes looking for it last year.
Limitations and What This Method Fails At
Obituaries are not reliable sources for everything. They are written by family members or funeral directors, often under time pressure, and frequently contain inaccuracies. I found a published obituary in the Tribune that listed a birth year off by five years for my great grandfather. The Social Security records I pulled later corrected it. Another obituary claimed someone served in the Navy when they actually served in the Army. These errors are common enough that you should treat any factual claim in an obituary as a lead, not as a verified fact. The Tribune's online archive also has a significant gap between 1998 and 2003 where digitization was incomplete. Some years are fully available, others have large swaths missing. If your research falls in that window, microfilm or the library copy is your only real option. There is no workaround for that gap other than physical access or asking a reference librarian to pull the specific issues for you. Finally, the cost-benefit ratio shifts quickly. If you are researching more than two or three ancestors from the Kokomo area, the subscription model becomes expensive relative to what you get. A single day at the Howard County Public Library with the microfilm is free and covers far more ground than a month of online searches hitting paywalls and incomplete results. I recommend starting offline before you spend any money.
