Accessing Utah Newspaper Obituary Archives Without Losing Your Mind
Going through old newspaper obituaries in Utah is a lot like fishing in a lake you know has fish but can never quite reach. I spent weeks a few years ago tracking down a great-aunt who died in the late 1990s, and I will tell you now that the digital archive situation for the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News is serviceable but deeply uneven. You will find what you need if you are patient and know where to look, but the process is not something I would call intuitive. The core of the problem is that these two papers were digitized on different platforms at different times. The Deseret News obituaries go back further in a searchable format, mostly through their partnership with Ancestry.com and their own archive at desertnews.com. The Salt Lake Tribune has its own digital run, but the coverage before roughly 1997 is spotty at best. If your person died before 1997 and you think they might have been in the Tribune, you are going to need a backup plan immediately. I found this out the hard way when researching a family member who passed in 1994. The Tribune's online archive simply had no record of the obituary. I ended up pulling the microfilm from the Salt Lake County Central Library, which took about three hours of my afternoon and required a library card. The microfilm reader was one of those heavy machines that jams if you look at it wrong, and I went through approximately forty reels before I found the page. The obituary itself was only a third of a column wide and typed in a font that made most letters look identical. I spent another hour squinting at it before recognizing the name.
So here is what actually works if you are trying to dig into these archives. Start with the Deseret News because their digital run is more complete and their search interface is less broken. Go to the Ancestry.com Utah newspaper collection or use the Deseret News site directly. You can search by name, date range, and location. The date range function is critical because the full-text search is not smart enough to handle approximate dates well. Narrow your window to three days on either side of the death date you already have, and you will usually get results in under ten seconds. The Tribune is a different animal. Their archive lives through a subscription service called Newspapers.com, which is owned by Ancestry. You will need a paid account, and even then the OCR quality for older articles is hit or miss. Names from the early 2000s sometimes come through garbled because the original typesetting used fonts that the digitization software never learned to read properly. I recommend running a search with wildcards or partial names if your first attempt returns nothing. Search for "Johnson" plus the year rather than the full name "Robert Johnson" and you will often pick up results that the exact match misses entirely. Another thing nobody tells you about these archives: the obituary that ran in the paper is not always the same text as the one online. Both papers edited their obituaries differently depending on the era. Pre-2000 Tribune obituaries that appear in the digital archive are often shortened versions, stripped of family listings and biographical details that ran in print. If you need the full text, you have to go to the physical paper or the microfilm. This matters if you are building a family tree or doing genealogical research, because the names of surviving relatives are usually in those removed sections.
There is also the issue of index gaps. The Deseret News has an online index that covers most of the 1980s onward, but there are known gaps in the indexing for 1986 and parts of 1991. If a name does not appear in the index, it does not mean the obituary did not run. It means the index was never created for that period. I ran into this when someone told me their grandfather died in March 1986 and the index had nothing. The obituary existed in the microfilm, but the digital index simply skipped those months entirely. You have to know to look past the index and search the actual archived pages directly. If you are doing a lot of this research, I would recommend setting up a systematic approach rather than just searching randomly. Write down the date range, the paper, and the source you checked for each person. You will forget which database you already searched within a week, and you will waste time re-searching the same name across both papers. A simple spreadsheet with columns for name, date of death, paper, search term used, and result found works fine. I use a shared Google sheet with my siblings so we do not duplicate effort. The biggest limitation you need to understand is that neither archive is complete. Military personnel who died overseas, people who lived just outside Salt Lake County, and folks whose families chose burial in other states may not appear in either paper at all. I once spent two days searching both archives for a man who served in the Navy and died in 1988 in San Diego. He never appeared because his family live in Oregon and his obituary ran in an Oregon paper instead. The assumption that all Utah deaths are covered by these two papers is wrong, and it costs time you will not get back.
Get the Full Details
For anyone who needs more than one or two obituaries, the University of Utah's Harold B. Lee Library has a dedicated genealogy room with both papers on microfilm and some bound volumes. The reference librarians there are helpful but understaffed, so you will not get deep assistance. They can show you how to use the film reader and where the Utah section is shelved, but they will not do the research for you. Plan for a half-day minimum if you are pulling bound volumes, because they are heavy and the binding on papers from the 1970s is loose enough that you have to handle them carefully to avoid damage. One practical tip that saved me hours: the Deseret News allows free access to their digital archive if you have a valid Utah public library card through their partnership with several county systems. The Salt Lake Public Library card works for their portion of the archive. Check with your local library before paying for a Newspapers.com subscription. I have seen people pay thirty dollars a month for access they could have gotten for free through their county library system. The digitization quality varies significantly by year. Articles from 2005 onward are generally clean and searchable. Articles from 1995 to 2004 are readable but occasionally contain OCR errors that turn a letter into a number or swap adjacent letters. Articles before 1995 are if you are lucky. Treat any search result from that era as a lead, not a confirmation, and verify it against the original image every time. Misreading a digit in a date is the most common error I see people make when working with these archives.
There is no single master database that combines both papers. You will always be working across two separate systems with different search interfaces, different coverage periods, and different access requirements. Building a comprehensive obituary profile for someone who lived in the Salt Lake area usually means checking both papers for every death date, plus considering regional papers like the Ogden Standard-Examiner or Provo Daily Herald if the person lived outside Salt Lake County proper. This doubles your work but is necessary if you want accurate results. My final suggestion, and it is not glamorous, is to keep physical copies of anything you find. Screenshots and PDF downloads disappear when subscription services change their terms or when databases are reorganized. I lost access to a scanned Tribune page last year when Newspapers.com updated their platform and the link broke. I had saved a screenshot but not a downloadable PDF, and when I tried to get a fresh copy, the page was no longer available in the format I had originally seen it. Save everything you find locally and label the files clearly with the date, paper name, and your source URL before the link expires.
