Understanding the Sharon Herald Obituary Process
The Sharon Herald is a local newspaper serving Mercer County and surrounding areas in northwest Pennsylvania. Their obituary section runs several times per week, mostly on Thursdays and Sundays. If you are trying to locate a specific notice or understand how the publication works, here is what you need to know based on actually navigating this system over the years. I have spent more time than I care to admit digging through these archives, both for genealogy research and personal family matters. The process is straightforward if you know where to look, but there are several frustrating gaps that can waste your afternoon if you are not prepared. The Sharon Herald publishes obituaries through a combination of direct submissions from funeral homes and a paid legacy services platform. Most families work with local funeral directors who handle the submission. The Herald has a partnership with Legacy.com for online publishing, which means many obituaries appear on both the newspaper's site and the larger aggregation platform simultaneously.
Here is the practical workflow. For recent obituaries, head to the Sharon Herald website and navigate to the obituaries section. You can search by name, date range, or keyword. Results typically cover back to around 2015 or 2016 on the digital side. Before that, you are dealing with physical archives or microfilm. I ran into a real problem last year when researching my great aunt's death in 2009. Her obituary appeared in print but had not been digitized yet, and the online search returned nothing. The workaround was straightforward but not obvious. I called the Herald's main office directly, asked for the obituary editor or archivist, and requested a scan of the specific issue. They provided a PDF of the page within two business days. The key is asking for the archive desk specifically. General customer service staff do not have access to the physical records and will just send you in circles. The digitization gap is a genuine limitation. Not every obituary from the early 2010s has been scanned, and coverage from the 1990s and earlier is almost entirely on microfilm. If you are doing serious genealogical work, plan for this. The Mercer County historical society also holds copies of older Herald issues, and their staff tends to be more flexible about searches than the newspaper office itself.
Pricing is another factor people overlook. Submitting an obituary to the Sharon Herald is not free. The cost depends on length and whether you include a photograph. As of my last check, a basic text-only obituary runs roughly $150 to $200, while adding a photo can push that toward $300 or more. Funeral homes often package this into their services, so families sometimes do not see the actual charge. If you are submitting independently, call the Herald's advertising department to get current rates before you finalize anything. One counter-intuitive thing about these obituaries: they are not always accurate in the details you might expect. I have seen incorrect dates of birth, missing surviving family members listed due to submission errors from funeral homes, and occasional misspellings of surnames. The Herald does fact-check, but they rely on the information provided to them. If you are citing an obituary for genealogical purposes, cross-reference it with actual vital records whenever possible. An obituary is a helpful starting point, not a definitive source. Another nuance beginners miss is the distinction between an obituary and a death notice. The Herald publishes both, and they serve different purposes. A death notice is a brief, factual announcement that typically includes only the essentials: name, age, date of death, and funeral home information. An obituary is a longer narrative piece, often written by family members or close friends, that includes biographical details, survivors, life achievements, and service information. The death notice is cheaper and faster to place. The obituary costs more but provides substantially more genealogical value. If you want detailed family information, you need an obituary, not a death notice.
Get the Full Details
For accessing older records, microfilm is your primary tool. The Sharon library system maintains microfilm copies going back several decades. You need to request a viewer, and you can pull issues by date. This takes time but is free. The alternative is paying a research service or a genealogist to pull copies for you, which usually runs between $5 and $15 per page depending on the provider. There is also the matter of searchability. Even within the digitized archive, the search function has limitations. It does not handle phonetic spellings well, and partial name searches can return hundreds of irrelevant results. If you are searching for a common surname in the Sharon area, narrow your date range to within six months of your estimated death date. This cuts the result set dramatically and saves significant time. If the obituary you need does not appear in the Sharon Herald at all, consider that the family may have chosen to publish elsewhere. Some families opt for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or smaller regional publications. It is worth checking the Evans City Messenger and the Shenango Valley publications as well, since the Herald's coverage area overlaps with those papers in certain parts of Mercer County.
One final practical note. If you are planning to submit an obituary yourself, the Herald prefers that you submit your copy in advance rather than calling in a manuscript. Email submissions go to their advertising or news desk, and they will review it for compliance with content guidelines before publication. They will contact you if there are issues with the wording or formatting. This review process usually adds one to two days to the timeline, so do not expect same-day publication even if you submit early in the week.
