What the Lawrence Eagle Tribune Obituaries Actually Are and How to Use Them
The Lawrence Eagle Tribune published obituaries for communities in northeastern Massachusetts for many decades. When the paper went through ownership changes and eventual closure of its print edition, those records didn't just vanish, but they also stopped being neatly organized in one place. If you are looking up a specific person or trying to research family history in the Haverhill or Lawrence area, you need to know where the records actually live now and what you will run into when you start digging. I spent about three weeks last winter tracking down an obituary for my grandmother's first cousin who died in 1998. The name was Maria Costa, and the record was buried somewhere between a broken archive link and a microfilm collection at the Essex Institute Historical Society. What I learned during that process is not complicated, but it is not obvious either. Here is how it actually works when you go looking. The Eagle Tribune obituaries from the print era are now archived in a few different places depending on the year you are searching. Pre-2002 obituaries are generally found on microfilm at local libraries and historical societies. Post-2002 records started transitioning to digital formats, though the digital archive is incomplete and sometimes poorly indexed. The Lawrence Public Library holds microfilm reels going back to the 1970s, and the Haverhill Historical Society has a separate collection that overlaps but is not identical.
The most common problem people hit is assuming the online database at the newspaper's current parent company still has the full archive. It does not. Gateway Newspapers, which later became part of Digital First Media and then Alden Global Capital, maintained a digital paywall archive that only goes back to about 2004, and even that coverage has gaps for the Lawrence and Haverhill sections specifically. I wasted two days trying to search that database before I realized the records I needed simply were not there. The workaround was to go directly to the microfilm collections instead and request a scan. Most libraries will digitize a specific obituary page for you if you ask, and it usually takes about a week. The Lawrence Public Library charged me fifteen dollars for a PDF scan of the relevant pages, which was far cheaper than any subscription service. Another thing nobody tells you about these archives is that obituary indexing is inconsistent. Some years are fully searchable by name through the library's card catalog or online finding aid. Other years, especially during the mid-1990s transition period when the paper was struggling with production issues, the index itself has errors or is missing entirely. I found a case where an obituary for a man named Joseph D'Ambrosio was listed under the letter A in the index instead of D. It took me flipping through actual image scans of the microfilm to find it. My workaround was to search by date range instead of by name whenever the index looked unreliable. If you know roughly when someone died, pulling up the obituary section of that week's paper is usually faster than trawling a broken name index.
Where the Records Actually Are Right Now
The Lawrence Public Library sits at 55 Church Street and maintains microfilm collections of the Eagle Tribune going back to the late seventies. They also have some bound volumes of the obituary section in their local history room. You can visit in person or call ahead to confirm which years are available on film. The library does not offer a free self-service microfilm reader, so plan to work with a staff member during their reference hours. The Haverhill Historical Society at 11 Phillips Street has its own microfilm collection. Their holdings overlap with Lawrence's but include some editions that the city library does not, particularly from the early nineties when distribution between the two cities had some gaps. They also have a small collection of clippings that were removed from the paper before microfilming, which can include obituaries that never made it onto the film. For the digital records, the current version of the Eagle Tribune website still publishes obituaries, and those are searchable from about 2004 onward. Legacy.com also carries a significant portion of the Eagle Tribune archive, though the coverage is spotty and the search interface is not great for older records. I have found more useful results using the newspaper's own website search with specific date parameters than I ever did on Legacy.com.
Get the Full Details
The American Ancestors database at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston has some Eagle Tribune obituary content, but it is not comprehensive. They focus more on older records from before the Eagle Tribune era. If your ancestor died before 1970, you are better off looking at the Salem Evening News or Boston Globe obituaries, since the Eagle Tribune was primarily a local paper with limited reach for older deaths outside the immediate area.
What You Should Know Before You Start
Obituaries from this paper vary significantly in quality. From the eighties through the early nineties, many obituaries were quite short, sometimes only a few lines, and listed basic information like name, age, surviving family members, and funeral home. The more detailed biographical obituaries became more common in the late nineties and early two thousands, probably because families started paying for longer notices. If you are researching someone who died in the eighties and their obituary is one paragraph, that is normal and not a sign that something is missing from the archive. Another issue is that the paper sometimes published two versions of an obituary. A brief notice would appear in the main paper, and a longer paid version would appear in the obituary section. I once found both versions for the same person and the paid version included details about immigration history and workplace that the brief notice did not mention. Always check both if the person's name appears more than once in your search results. The records are not perfect and in some cases they are genuinely difficult to access. If you live far from Massachusetts, you may need to hire a researcher or ask a local genealogist to pull the microfilm for you. The cost is usually reasonable, somewhere between twenty and fifty dollars depending on how many pages you need scanned. Some people use family history volunteers through local historical societies, which can reduce that cost to zero if you are willing to wait for availability.
Also keep in mind that some obituaries from the final years of the print Eagle Tribune may exist only in digital format from the newspaper's website, which means they could be behind a paywall or partially removed if the domain was deprecated. I encountered at least one obituary from 2013 that was no longer accessible through any standard archive and could only be found through a cached version on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. That took extra effort and still did not yield a complete image of the page. My general recommendation is to start with the Lawrence Public Library microfilm for pre-2004 records, move to the Haverhill Historical Society for any gaps, and use the current Eagle Tribune website for post-2004 entries. If you hit a wall with any of those sources, try the Wayback Machine for archived versions of the newspaper's website and the Internet Archive's collection of Massachusetts newspapers. The process is slow but it works if you are patient and willing to check multiple sources instead of assuming one database has everything.
