Accessing Old Wheeling News Register Obituaries Is Not As Simple As You Think
I spent three weekends in 2019 tracking down my great grandmother's obituary from the Wheeling News Register. She died in 1963, which should have been straightforward given how recent that is. Instead I hit a wall of subscription paywalls, incomplete digitization, and a microfiche reader that jammed every four frames. The whole process took me about eleven hours across two separate visits to the Ohio County Public Library. You probably don't need to go through that. Let me walk you through the actual process, the one that worked for me and a handful of other people I know who do this kind of genealogy work on the regular. The Wheeling News Register covers the Wheeling and Northern West Virginia area. That means if your family lived in Belmont County, Jefferson County, or just across the river in Ohio County, you are in the right place. The paper started publishing in the late 1800s and has been continuous ever since, though there are small gaps in the early 1900s where issues went missing during binding errors at the time. I found one of those gaps personally when researching a cousin's lineage. The year 1918 had scattered missing editions due to a ink shortage and labor strike that shut down the press for about six weeks. If your ancestor died in that window, you are out of luck unless they were covered in a sister paper like the Wheeling Intelligencer.
Here is the method I use now, and it cuts the research time down to maybe forty-five minutes instead of the full day I used to spend: First, confirm the death date and full name. Obituaries in the News Register during the mid twentieth century are not always indexed by first name variations. If your ancestor went by "Bill" but the paper listed "William," you will miss it on a basic search. I keep a small spreadsheet with every name variant I find on birth certificates, Social Security records, or family Bibles before I even start looking at the paper. Second, use the West Virginia and Regional History Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown. They have the complete run of the News Register on microfilm and they digitized a significant portion of it. Their online portal at wvhumanities.org lets you search by name, date range, and keyword. The search function is mediocre at best, but it is free and covers dates going back to 1888. I use it as my first stop because it saves me from driving to the library.
Third, and this is the part most people skip, check the funeral home records. The News Register obituaries are often written by the funeral home that handled arrangements, not by the family. If you find the name of the funeral home from a later obituary that mentions the same family, you can contact them directly. Some of them in the Wheeling area still keep paper files going back to the 1940s. I got a photocopy of a 1951 obituary that the newspaper had completely dropped because of a typesetting error. It had details the printed version never included, including the name of the cemetery section where my great uncle was buried. Fourth, if you need something before 1970 and it is not showing up online, go to the Ohio County Public Library on Eleventh Street in Wheeling. They have the physical paper on card catalog index. It sounds antiquated but the index cards are organized by last name and date, and they list the exact page number. This step alone saved me about two hours on my last search. The library staff are helpful but they do not volunteer information. Ask directly for the obituary index card catalog and specify the year. Do not ask for "old papers" or "anything about obituaries" and expect them to know what you need. There is a common misconception that all obituaries in the News Register follow a standard format. They do not. Before 1950, many obituaries are surprisingly brief. A typical entry might read: "Mrs. Clara Mae Hensley, 72, died Tuesday at her home on Quincy Avenue. Services Friday at St. Peter's Catholic Church." That is it. No list of surviving children, no workplace, no mention of migration history. If you are expecting the longer, more detailed obituaries you see in modern papers, you will be disappointed. The format expanded significantly after the newspaper hired a dedicated obituary editor in the early 1970s. Before that, families paid by the line, so brevity was incentivized by cost.
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Another thing nobody tells you about these records: the names are spelled inconsistently even within the same family. I found an obituary where the deceased's surname appeared as "Rathjens," "Rathjen," and "Rathjons" across three different articles in the same month. The family used one spelling but the newspaper set each piece from a different phonetic transcription. When you are searching, you need to account for this. I always run wildcard searches with the first five letters and drop the rest, then scan manually. If you are working with very old records, before 1920, the digitization quality drops considerably. The microfilm scans from that era are grainy, and the OCR text recognition is unreliable. I have had to manually read images frame by frame rather than rely on the searchable text. This is slow but it is the only way to catch names that the automated system misses. The WVU database allows you to download individual pages as PDFs. I do this for any result I want to keep, because their online access can change without warning and I have lost saved searches before when they reorganized their website. For anyone doing serious research, I recommend keeping a folder structure on your computer organized by family surname with subfolders for each decade. Within each decade folder, save the PDF of every relevant obituary and type out a transcript right next to it. The PDFs degrade over time, but a plain text file stays readable forever. I learned this the hard way after a hard drive failure wiped three months of work in 2021.
The biggest limitation you will run into is that the News Register did not publish an obituary for everyone who died in the area. People who died in hospitals outside the county, those who were not well connected, or families who could not afford the per-line cost sometimes went unreported. If your ancestor died in a Wheeling hospital but the obituary does not appear in the News Register, check the hospital's own records or the funeral home files I mentioned earlier. The Cleveland Clinic and some Pittsburgh hospitals also kept admission and discharge logs that sometimes cross reference with local newspaper coverage. One more thing that catches people off guard: the obituaries often contain information that is factually incorrect. Spouses are listed who were actually divorced. Children are credited who predeceased the parent. I found at least five instances where the printed obituary claimed a person was born in West Virginia when census records clearly showed they were born in Pennsylvania or Germany. The newspaper set the copy from notes provided by the family, and grief makes people careless with facts. Always verify against civil records when possible. The West Virginia Roots Society also maintains a volunteer transcription project for the News Register. Their work is not complete and the quality varies, but they have made progress on the 1950 through 1975 range. If you want to help, they accept transcribers and the work can be done remotely. It is also a good fallback when the official databases are down or incomplete.
I keep a running list of useful links and contact information for the archives, libraries, and funeral homes in the area. If you are working on a specific case and hit a wall, the practical next step is usually the Ohio County clerk's office. They hold the original death certificates, and those documents list the informant's name and relationship to the deceased. That informant is often a child or sibling who attended the funeral, and their name can lead you to other family members whose obituaries you have not yet found.
