Where to Actually Find Salem Evening News Obituaries
The Salem Evening News ran from 1877 until it folded in 1988. That's over a century of records. If you're looking for obituaries from that paper, the physical archive lives at the Peabody Essex Museum's library. The digital side is a mess. I spent about three weekends tracking down the right access points because the usual genealogy databases don't cover this paper cleanly.
Remembering The Past Uncovering The Rich History Of Salem Evening News Obituaries In Salem Ma
Start at the Salem Public Library. They have microfilm of the Evening News on-site. You'll need to request the reel for the date range you want. They don't circulate the microfilm. You read it there. The machine has a basic print function but the quality is terrible for anything older than the 1950s. I usually just take notes by hand or use my phone camera with the screen turned way down so the glare doesn't blow out the text. The Peabody Essex has some digitized items but their find-a-thing search is not helpful for obituaries specifically. They catalog by subject headings sometimes and sometimes by broad date ranges. You're better off emailing their reference desk with a specific name and approximate date. They'll tell you if they have it and whether it's digitized or microfilm only. Response time varies. I've gotten replies in two days and in three weeks. Ancestry.com has some Salem Evening News content but the OCR quality is awful for the early decades. Names get mangled constantly. "Michael" becomes "M1chael" or just drops a letter. You have to browse the images manually rather than relying on search. That means knowing the date range before you start. Otherwise you're flipping through thousands of pages for nothing.
Fold3 has a smaller collection from this paper. It's mostly veterans' notices and war-related announcements. If your ancestor served in the military, check there separately. The coverage is spotty but free if you already have a subscription through the military or library system.
What Makes These Obituaries Different From Other Papers
Salem was a port city. A lot of the Evening News obituaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s mention maritime connections. Ship names, ports of departure, cargo routes. Those details don't show up in Boston papers. I found a 1903 obituary where the deceased was listed as "master mariner, recently of the barkentine Rosemary of Liverpool" and that single line connected me to a ship registry I hadn't known existed. That kind of thing is why you dig into local papers instead of just pulling national indexes. The language in these obits changes noticeably around 1920. Before that, they were longer. More detail about the person's life, their work, their family connections. After 1920 they get shorter and more generic. The paper was competing with the Salem News and the daily format shifted. Editors started squeezing content. If you're researching someone who died in the 1920s or later, don't assume the shorter obit means less important. It just means the paper changed its style. One edge case I hit constantly: married women. Before 1940, most married women's obituaries list them only as "Mrs. [Husband's Full Name]." No maiden name, no birth date. The workaround is checking the husband's obituary if one exists. Sometimes he mentions her by first name or gives her family background. Other times you have to cross-reference marriage records from the Essex County Registry or the Salem city clerk's office. I keep a separate spreadsheet for maiden names I can't confirm yet. It's annoying but it works.
Get the Full Details
Digitization Gaps and What They Miss
The microfilm at the Salem Public Library covers most of the run but there are gaps. The years 1918 and 1919 are incomplete. Flu season killed a lot of people and the paper had trouble keeping up with staffing. Some weeks just have fewer pages. If your ancestor died in that window, check the Essex County death registers at the Massachusetts Archives. They filed everything separately. Newspaperarchive.com has some Salem Evening News issues but the upload is inconsistent. Certain months from 1955 to 1962 are missing entirely. I don't know why. The site owner probably lost the reels or never acquired them. You'll see a gap in the browse view. Just move on. Don't waste time refreshing. FamilySearch has a few Salem Evening News issues scanned and free to view. The collection is tiny compared to what's available commercially. But if you're doing this for free, it's worth checking because those images are full text searchable in a way the paid sites sometimes aren't. The catch is the date range is shallow. Mostly 1900 to 1930 roughly.
Practical Workflow That Actually Saves Time
Don't start by searching a database. Start by narrowing your date range from other sources first. Find the death certificate, the burial record, the church ledger, whatever you have. Get the date within a week. Then go to the microfilm or the image browser and scan that specific window. Manual browsing a known date range takes about 15 minutes. Searching blind in a bad OCR database can take all afternoon and still return nothing useful. When you find the obit, photograph or transcribe it immediately. Microfilm degrades. The library copies get fuzzier each time someone runs the machine. I've seen the same obit two years apart where the second viewing lost three lines of text that were visible the first time. Write down the volume number, the frame number, and the date. The library staff can pull the exact reel faster if you have all three. Check the classified section on the same page or the page after. Families sometimes ran separate death announcements or memorial cards that paid for by the line. Those ads have different information than the newspaper obituary. A death announcement from 1931 I found listed the funeral home address and the exact time of service. Theobit itself had neither. That funeral home was still in business and I got additional records from them.
When the Paper Has Nothing
Sometimes the Evening News didn't run an obituary at all. That happens. Not every death gets printed. If the family couldn't afford the space or chose not to, or if the person wasn't well connected in the community, you might find nothing. In those cases, switch to the Salem News which started in 1901 and merged with the Evening News in 1988. The merger means some coverage overlaps and the later years of the Evening News sometimes cross-reference the other paper. The Essex Institute Historical Collections, published by the Peabody Essex, has indexed material from both papers. It's not complete but it catches things the microfilm misses because the indexers pulled notices from sidebars and community pages that wouldn't normally be called obituaries. The index is at the PEM library. You can't search it online. Go there or email with a specific query. If you hit a dead end with all of this, try the Massachusetts Vital Records online system for the death certificate. It won't give you the obituary text but it will confirm the date and give you the informant's name. The informant is usually a family member. That name can lead you to a relative whose obituary does exist and mentions your person by relationship.
