What Easton Express Obituaries Actually Are and How They Work
The Easton Express has been publishing obituaries for decades, probably longer than most people in the area realize. It started as a local newspaper service where families would call in death notices, and over time it became a proper obituary section with longer bios, photos, and funeral details. The format hasn't changed dramatically, but the process of getting something published has shifted with digital tools. If you're trying to remember or document the full history here, you're dealing with a couple of different things at once. There's the archive itself — the actual obituaries that have run over the years — and there's the institutional memory of how the Express handled them. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is where most people get stuck. I spent a few weeks tracking down pre-1998 records when my grandfather's name didn't show up in the digitized section. The Express had a microfilm archive at the Northampton County history room, but the finding aid was handwritten on index cards in someone's basement. I ended up calling the archivist, who pointed me to a box labeled "clippings 1970-1985" that nobody had catalogued properly. The workaround was straightforward once I knew where to look: I requested the specific box number and spent a Saturday morning going through it by hand. Took about four hours, found the obit on the third page of the fourth issue that year. Microfilm readers there are terrible for OCR, so if you need text extracted, don't bother trying to scan it — just photograph and type it yourself.
The Express obituary submissions process is managed through their main news desk, not a separate obituary department. You submit by phone or email, and they have a standard template with fields for name, age, survivors, service details, and a short bio paragraph. The limit is usually around 300 words for the free notice, and anything longer runs about $40 to $60 depending on whether you include a photo. Photos are welcome but you need to send a high-resolution TIFF or a very sharp JPEG — blurry scans from old frames look worse in print than you'd expect, and they won't reject it outright, they'll just publish it and you'll be stuck with it. A counter-intuitive thing about these archives: the Express doesn't maintain continuous coverage. There are gaps, usually around major holidays or staff changes, where entire months went unprinted or were lost during moves. If you're doing genealogical research and your family has been in the area since the 1950s, assume there will be blind spots. Don't treat a missing entry as proof the person wasn't noticed — they may have just missed a shift change or been submitted after a deadline cutoff that nobody documented. Another nuance beginners miss is that the Express often printed the bare minimum for decades before expanding. An obit from 1972 might be three sentences and a phone number. That doesn't mean the person wasn't important to their community. It means the paper charged by the line back then and families kept it short to save money. When you're building a timeline or understanding family history, read between the lines. The brevity itself is data.
If you want to access the modern archive, the Express website has a searchable obituary section going back to about 2012. Before that, you need to go through the library route. The Easton Public Library has the full run on microfilm and some bound volumes. They also have a local history librarian who can pull box files for a small donation, usually five dollars, which gets you access to clipping bundles that aren't indexed anywhere else. The biggest bottleneck I keep running into is name variations. "Express" obituaries sometimes list people by nickname, middle name only, or a maiden name they hadn't used in twenty years. If your search isn't returning results, try the spouse's name or the child's name as a cross-reference. The Express rarely indexes by relationship, but the text itself usually mentions survivors, which gives you enough to triangulate. I also learned the hard way that the Express ran a separate death notice column alongside the full obituaries. Death notices were one paragraph, no photo, just the essentials. Full obituaries got more space. People often confuse the two when searching, so if a family member died in Easton but you can't find a proper obituary, check the death notice section — it's usually grouped in the back pages or a dedicated insert, and it's easier to overlook if you're expecting a longer piece.
Get the Full Details
The legacy part of this is worth sitting with for a minute. These obituaries are one of the few consistent community records any mid-sized Pennsylvania paper maintained. They track migration patterns, family structure changes, occupational shifts, even slang and phrasing conventions over decades. A researcher who knows what they're doing can pull sociological insights from a stack of Express death notices that rival what you'd get from census fragments. But you have to treat them as primary sources, not decorative text. The format is rigid, but what gets included and what gets left out tells you everything about who mattered in Easton and why. For anyone actually trying to preserve or revisit this history, start with the library bound volumes. They're alphabetized by last name and much faster to scroll through than microfilm. Photograph the pages you need rather than copying by hand. The Express doesn't charge a research fee for library use, but they do require you to sign in and show ID, so plan for that overhead if you're coming from outside the area.
