Working With Obituary Archives From Small Town Newspapers
I spent about three weeks last fall trying to track down information about a great uncle who died in 1952 somewhere between Freeport and the surrounding areas in Illinois. The obituary I needed was supposedly in the Freeport Journal Standard, but it wasn't indexed anywhere useful. What I ended up learning about how these local newspaper archives actually work is probably worth sharing before I forget the details. The Chicago Public Library has digitized quite a bit of the Chicago Daily News, which sometimes picked up stories from smaller papers, but that's not the same thing. For the actual Freeport Journal Standard obituaries, your best starting point is the library system in Winnebago County. They've been digitizing older issues, though the coverage is patchy. I found that issues from the mid-1990s onward are mostly available through their digital collection, but anything before that tends to require a physical visit or a microfilm request. The search interface isn't great. You can look by date range, which helps if you know roughly when someone died. But searching by name alone? That usually returns garbage results because the OCR from old newspapers makes a mess of certain characters. I once spent an hour looking for an obituary that had "Phelps" printed in a font where the OCR read it as "Phelpa" or "Glpnes" depending on the week. You have to account for that kind of thing.
Practical workflow that actually works: When you know the approximate death date, go to the library's site and pull up the issue from that week. Look at the obituary section directly. If the death occurred in a nearby town like Belvidere or Rochelle, the obituary might actually run in the Freeport paper even if the person lived elsewhere. Local papers sometimes share content through mutual agreements or wire services. This catches people off guard when they're only searching the standard databases.
The Reality of Searching Older Issues
Pre-1990 obituaries are a different animal entirely. The microfilm versions exist at the Macomb location of the Northern Illinois University library system and possibly at the Chicago Historical Society, but you're looking at hours of winding and reading film. I spent a Saturday last year doing this for a 1947 death and found the obituary on frame 42 of reel 7. That's not information you can really convey to anyone who hasn't done it, because every researcher will hit different spots on different reels depending on what month they're looking for. The index that some libraries maintain for obituaries is itself problematic. Sometimes the indexer missed entries, sometimes they got the wrong dates attached, and sometimes the name was transcribed incorrectly. I encountered a case where a woman's obituary was indexed under her husband's last name rather than her own, which made sense at the time but absolutely wrecks your search if you're expecting her birth name to appear. Victorian naming conventions persist in ways that trip up modern researchers constantly. There's also the question of what actually gets published. Not everyone who dies in the area gets an obituary. Family financial constraints matter. Some families chose funeral notices instead of full obituaries, and those tend to be much shorter. A full obituary from the 1960s might run two to three columns, which translates to maybe 300 to 500 words. The 1940s versions were often thinner, sometimes just a paragraph. The amount of genealogical information contained in those varies enormously depending on which decade and which family wrote it.
Get the Full Details
What You Actually Find in These Obituaries
The useful details are there if you know where to look. Surviving family members, usually listed in order of relationship. Places of residence at time of death. Sometimes employment history that tells you what they did for a living. Occasional mentions of church affiliation or military service that open up other research paths. The 1950s and 1960s obituaries sometimes include the names of grandchildren, which is gold for family tree building since census records stop giving you that level of detail. But don't expect consistency. The format changed over the decades in ways that matter. Earlier obituaries tended to be more formal and included religious language that might tell you something about the family's values. Later ones became more secular and sometimes surprisingly brief. A 1982 obituary I pulled for a distant cousin was barely four sentences long and mentioned only that she survived by her sister. That's it. No parents, no children, no occupation. Just a sister in Rockford. When you're looking at recent obituaries from the past couple decades, you'll notice that the newspapers started including more biographical detail, partly because families pay per line or per word and want to maximize the content. Some of this is genuinely useful, but some of it is just padding with hobbies and favorite recipes. Distinguish between the two when you're extracting genealogical facts.
Alternative Sources When the Paper Doesn't Help
Find a Grave and other memorial sites have transcribed many of these obituaries, but the transcription quality is wildly uneven. I found a Freeport Journal Standard obituary from 1938 that someone had entered on a memorial page, and the transcription had the wrong death date by three weeks and misspelled the name of the funeral home. These sites are useful as starting points, not as verified sources. Always go back to the original if you can find it. Newspapers.com and Ancestry's newspaper collections sometimes have the Freeport Journal Standard, but the coverage is incomplete and the search functions on those platforms make the same OCR mistakes I described earlier. I've found cases where something was on Newspapers.com that wasn't on Ancestry's version of the same paper, which suggests the two services have different scraping or indexing processes. Checking both is worth the subscription cost if you're doing serious research in this area. The local historical society in Freeport itself sometimes has clippings that never made it into the digitized run. I ran into a researcher at the library who mentioned that when the paper moved to a new format in the late 1990s, they discarded some back issues rather than preserving them. Those gaps are permanent unless someone happened to save the physical copies.
Time Estimates and Practical Constraints
A typical search for a known obituary takes about 20 to 40 minutes if the death falls within the digitized range and the OCR cooperates. If you have to pivot to microfilm, plan for two to four hours depending on how far back you're going. Searching for obituaries without a death date is considerably more expensive time-wise because you're essentially flipping through weeks of content looking for a name that might not even be there. I once spent six hours on microfilm for someone whose family had simply chosen not to publish an obituary. They ran a funeral notice instead, which was three lines and listed only the burial location. Digitization projects move at different speeds depending on which institution is handling them. The Winnebago County public library has been working through their backlog, but funding shortages sometimes slow things down. If you need something urgently and it's not digitized yet, you might be out of luck until the next grant cycle. I learned this the hard way when a relative was diagnosed with a terminal illness and wanted to see a specific obituary for a parent before they passed. The issue I needed was sitting in an undigitized box at the library. The obituary section itself has shifted in placement within the paper over the years. In the 1980s and early 1990s, obituaries were sometimes buried in the back sections or printed on separate pages. Later, many papers consolidated them into a dedicated section that runs daily. This affects how you navigate the physical paper if you're doing research before the digitization catches up to recent years.
Building a Research Log
Keep detailed notes of everything you look at. I wrote down the volume, issue date, page number, and column location for every obituary I examined during my research. This sounds tedious, but you will forget exactly where you found something within a month, and retracing your steps through microfilm is not enjoyable. The note-taking also helps you spot patterns over time, like which families consistently published detailed obituaries versus which ones kept things minimal. If you're compiling information from multiple obituaries into a family history project, consider creating a spreadsheet that tracks the source, date, and key details from each entry. This becomes invaluable when you're trying to verify relationships or cross-reference information across different death events in the same family. The spreadsheet approach also makes it easier to share your findings with other researchers who might be working on the same branches.
