The Old Paper That Became Something More
The Rochester Post Bulletin ran obituaries for over a century, and when it folded in 2022, those pages didn't just disappear. They got archived, remastered, and eventually came back as a project called Rochesters Tribute Unveiling The Enduring Legacy Of The Rochester Post Bulletin Obituaries. I've spent more time than I care to admit digging through these records, so let me tell you how it actually works and what to watch out for. At its core, this is a digitization effort that took thousands of obituary pages from the Post Bulletin's print run and made them searchable online. The project pulls from the microfilm archives at the Public Library of Rochester and Monroe County, cross-references death indexes, and presents everything in a clean web interface. It is not a paid subscription service. You can browse and read every entry without entering a credit card or creating an account. Here is what most people miss when they first start using it. The interface sorts by date of publication, not by date of death. If someone died on January 3rd but the family chose to run the notice on January 14th, you will find it under the 14th. I wasted about twenty minutes searching the wrong week before I figured that out. Always check both the death date and the approximate publication window. The search bar accepts full names and partial names, but wildcard searches do not work the way you would expect. Putting a lone asterisk or question mark in the name field breaks the query entirely. Stick to full first names and any part of the last name.
The real value here is in the years before digital records existed. If you are researching a family line that lived in Monroe County before roughly 2005, this database is probably the single most useful resource available. The Post Bulletin obituaries from the 1980s and 1990s often contain details you will not find elsewhere: surviving siblings with their spouses named, hometown churches, military unit information, and sometimes even a brief paragraph about what the person actually did for a living. The newer entries from the 2010s onward tend to be shorter, probably because the newspaper started charging by the line. Length correlates directly with price, so families who could afford space wrote more.
How to Actually Use It
Navigate to the tribute site and you will see a search box at the top. Enter the name and click search. Results come back as a list of thumbnail images, each one linking to a scanned page. Click the thumbnail and the full obituary opens in a new tab. From there you can zoom, download the image, or copy the text. The download function is straightforward: a small button sits at the bottom right of the reader. It exports a PDF at roughly 300 DPI, which is good enough for most genealogical records. I want to flag one edge case that almost cost me a lot of time. A client once asked me to verify the birth date of a woman who died in 1967. The obituary clearly stated she was born in 1892, but her Social Security application on a completely different database showed 1889. I spent hours wondering if I had the wrong person. The problem turned out to be intentional age inflation, which was extremely common among women of her generation. The obituary was correct for what the family chose to publish. The workaround is simple: always check two independent sources before assuming a discrepancy is an error in the archive. Birth certificates, census records, and marriage licenses tend to preserve the actual dates better than funeral notices ever will. Another thing nobody tells you about this database. The OCR, the text recognition layer that makes the search bar work, is imperfect. Handwritten additions to typed obituaries, especially the ones done in ballpoint pen on the actual printed page, often get garbled. I have seen "born" turn into "borning" and "survived by" become "servant eyes." It is weird but true. If a search returns zero results for someone you are certain was published, try searching by a relative's name instead. Siblings and spouses are almost always mentioned in the surviving family section, and their names are usually typed cleanly.
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What This Project Is Not
Rochesters Tribute Unveiling The Enduring Legacy Of The Rochester Post Bulletin Obituaries is not a complete record of every death in the county. People who died outside Monroe County but whose families lived here are sometimes included, sometimes not, depending on where they passed away. It does not cover deaths before the Post Bulletin began publishing regular obituaries in the early twentieth century. And it absolutely does not include the funeral home listings, the cemetery interment records, or the police blotter mentions of deaths. Those exist in separate collections. There are also gaps. Certain years during the late 1990s and early 2000s were not fully microfilmed before the newspaper cut back on its archive budget. I know of at least eighteen months where the digital scanner skipped entirely, and those gaps show up as blank dates in the database. If you hit a missing month, try the library's physical microfilm room. The staff there is used to people asking about these holes, and they will pull the reel for you. It takes about ten minutes per month to scan through manually, but you will find whatever was missed digitally.
When to Look Elsewhere
If your research goes beyond Monroe County, this project will not help you. The New York State Death Index is free through the state archives and covers every county, though it only gives you the bare minimum: name, date, and county of death. No biographical details. For that you need local newspapers in the surrounding area. The Albany Times Union, the Syracuse Post-Standard, and the Buffalo News all have their own obituary archives, and they operate on different schedules. Some are fully digitized. Some are behind paywalls. Some only exist on microfilm. For genealogical purposes, I usually recommend starting with the New York State Death Index to establish the basic facts, then moving to the Post Bulletin tribute project for the richer content. That combination cuts my average research time from about two hours per person down to roughly twenty minutes. Most of the time is spent waiting for the scanner images to load, not doing the actual research. The tribute project itself is maintained by a small team of volunteers and local historians. There is no official support email listed on the front page, but the library's reference desk can route questions through. Response time is usually one to three business days. Do not expect immediate answers, and do not email them with requests that require pulling original physical documents. The database is the extent of what they provide remotely.
If you are working on a family history project and have a connection to Rochester, spending an afternoon here will probably pay for itself within the first hour. The information you find in these old newspaper pages tends to cascade into other records. A sibling's name leads to a census entry. A church name leads to baptismal or marriage records. A military unit leads to service files. It all connects. That is the whole point of keeping these pages alive after the ink dried up.
