Reading Mon Valley Obituaries Is Not As Simple As You Think
The Mon Valley Independent is a newspaper that serves the communities south of Pittsburgh, and its obituary section is where a lot of people go when they are trying to piece together family history or confirm basic biographical details. It has been publishing these notices for decades, and the archive goes back further than most people realize. But there are practical issues you run into if you actually try to use them for genealogical research or just general information gathering. The obituary section publishes daily, usually in the back pages or as a dedicated section. Each notice contains the basic details: full name, age, residence, funeral home arrangements, and often a short biography. The format is pretty standardized, which makes scanning them faster than it would be otherwise. I used to work with these archives when helping people track down relatives who lived in the Monessen, Chester, and Washington Borough areas, and the main problem I kept running into was that the older physical papers are not fully digitized. There is a digitization project in progress, but it is incomplete and moves slowly. If you are looking for something before roughly 2015, you should expect to visit the Westmoreland County Historical Society or the Monessen Carnegie Library in person. The library has microfilm of the paper going back to its founding in 1884, and I have spent more afternoons than I care to admit squinting at grainy microfilm frames trying to pull out a name that the index missed. The index is another piece of this that you need to know about. They publish an annual index for the previous year's obituaries, which helps, but names that are misspelled in the original notice will not show up in the index regardless.
The digitized version on their website covers the more recent material, and you can search by name, date range, or keyword. The search function is basic but functional. It does handle boolean operators, which means you can narrow things down if you need to. The problem I hit most often was with maiden names. Women's obituaries sometimes list the maiden name in parentheses and sometimes do not, so a search by maiden name alone will miss half the results. I got around this by searching the person's current married surname along with the birth year rather than trying to rely on the maiden name field. Here is what the process actually looks like if you want to find a specific obituary: Start with the online archive at monvalleyindependent.com and run a name search. If you get results, read through the notices carefully. Look for the person's residence and the names of surviving family members to confirm it is the right individual. The obituaries in this paper often list parents and siblings, which is useful but inconsistent. Some notices include a detailed biography. Others are just two paragraphs with the standard funeral home boilerplate. The depth of the notice tends to depend on how much the family paid for it, since the paper charges by the line or by the inch.
If your search returns nothing online, the next step is to check whether the person died in the years before the digitization cutoff. For those years, you need to contact the Monessen Carnegie Library Reference Department and request a microfilm lookup. They will give you the exact volume and frame number if the index matches. From there you can either go in person or pay them to make a copy. The library does offer a mail service for this at a small fee per page, which saves a trip if you live outside the area. I would recommend calling ahead and confirming which years are currently available on microfilm, because the collection does get reordered occasionally and older holdings can be missing if they were not stored properly during the move from the previous building. There are some things you should know before you invest a lot of time in this. The paper does not publish obituaries for people who died outside the Mon Valley area unless they had strong ties to the region. If your ancestor moved to another state and died there, you will likely not find their notice here even if they were born in Monongahela. The obituaries also do not follow a consistent format over time. The early notices from the 1980s and earlier are much shorter and less detailed than the modern ones, so do not assume that a brief notice means the person was not well-known in the community. Economic conditions in the valley affected how much space families could afford, and that shows up in the length and content of the notices. Another issue is that the index sometimes contains errors. I ran into a case where the index listed an obituary under a completely wrong surname because the typesetter made a typo in the original publication. The person's actual name was correct in the body of the notice, but the index entry sent me in the wrong direction initially. You have to be willing to browse by date rather than relying solely on the index. If you know approximately when the person died, going to that week's issue manually will save you more time than any search tool available.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries themselves are useful for confirming dates, but they are not comprehensive primary sources for everything. They will not tell you military service details with the same accuracy as a VA record, and they rarely include full addresses beyond the town or borough. What they do give you well is a snapshot of who survived the person, the funeral home used, and the location of the service. That last detail matters because the funeral home records can sometimes provide additional information that the newspaper notice omits. If you are doing serious research, cross-reference the obituary with Social Security Death Index entries, Pennsylvania death certificates, and cemetery records. The Washington County or Westmoreland County courthouses hold the death certificates for the relevant jurisdiction. These documents are public records and can be requested by mail. The certificate will list the informant's name and relationship, which sometimes reveals a family connection that the obituary did not mention. I found this out the hard way when an obituary listed a spouse but the death certificate named a different person as the informant, pointing to a second marriage that the family had not discussed publicly. The Mon Valley Independent also maintains a Facebook page where recent obituaries are posted, sometimes with additional photos. This is not an official archive, and posts can be removed or edited, so treat it as a supplementary source rather than a reliable repository. I have seen notices disappear from the page within a few weeks of publication, which is why the print archive and the library microfilm remain the authoritative record.
If you need help navigating the archive or interpreting what you find, the reference librarians at the Monessen Carnegie Library are generally knowledgeable about local genealogical resources. They will not do the research for you, but they can point you to finding aids and explain how the microfilm volumes are organized. The online search tool on the newspaper's website has improved over the years, but it still lacks some of the filters you would find in commercial genealogy databases. It is free to use, though, and for someone working within the Mon Valley region, it is often the first place I recommend people look before they spend money on other services.
