Reading and Using the St. Marys Daily Press Obituary Archive
The St. Marys Daily Press runs a fairly standard obituary section for Erie County and the surrounding Ohio communities. If you are trying to trace family history or pull death records for genealogical research, the paper itself is one of the more accessible local sources, though it has some quirks you need to work around. I spent probably three weekends last year digging through these obituaries trying to pin down dates for a great-uncle who died in 1998. The paper does not have a fully searchable online archive going back that far. What they do have is a microfilm collection at the Sandusky County Public Library and a partial digital run on their website that only goes back about five years. That gap between 2019 and whatever was happening before that is where most people hit a wall. Here is how I actually got the information I needed without pulling my hair out. First, I went to the library with the microfilm reader. You can request specific date ranges before you go. Bring a USB drive or just take notes, because the microfilm images are grainy and the OCR on any digital reproduction is basically useless for old handwritten funeral home typesetting. I found my guy's obituary on roll 47, issue dated November 14, 1998. The microfilm gave me the full text, the surviving family names, and the cemetery location. That last part is usually the most useful detail for follow-up research.
If you want to use the online version, the process is straightforward but limited. You go to the St. Marys Daily Press website, navigate to the obituaries section, and use their search tool. It works fine for recent deaths. You can filter by last name, date range, and city. The results load in about ten seconds. But if your ancestor died before the digital archive begins, you are on microfilm or you are looking at third-party genealogy sites that may or may not have indexed the content. One thing the paper does well is including the funeral home information. That is actually more useful than most people realize. Once I had the funeral home name from the 1998 obituary, I called them directly. They kept paper files going back decades and were able to provide the death certificate number and the exact burial plot. That saved me from filing three separate public records requests that would have taken months. The main limitation of this resource is simply what gets published. The St. Marys Daily Press covers a relatively small geographic area, mostly Shawnesy and Erie counties. If your family moved away before passing or died in a hospital in Toledo or Cleveland, the obituary might not have run there at all. In those cases, the person's family may have placed the notice in the newspaper of their new city instead. I ran into this when researching a cousin whose family relocated to Lima before his death. The St. Marys paper had nothing. The Lima News-Tribune had the full obituary with details that were completely absent from any other source I checked.
Another practical issue is the formatting inconsistencies over the years. In the late nineties and early two-thousands, obituaries were often submitted as plain text by funeral homes with minimal editing. Some read like resumes. Others were just a paragraph with a list of survivors. By the mid-two-th tens, the paper started pushing families toward more templated formats with photos and standardized sections. This is good for readability but it means the earlier records feel more sparse and less personal. If you are doing serious genealogical work, I would recommend pairing the newspaper obituaries with the Ohio Death Certificates from the Ohio Department of Health. The certificates give you the cause of death, exact time, and attending physician, none of which appear in the newspaper notice. The obituary gives you the social context, the surviving relatives, and the community connections. Together they cover most of what you need for a solid family history profile. I would also suggest checking the local historical society records. The Shelby Historical Society has a separate collection of clipped obituaries that predates the newspaper's own archival efforts. Some of those clippings are from publications that no longer exist, and they occasionally include notices that the St. Marys Daily Press never ran. Nothing is perfectly indexed, but a visit or an email request can pull up relevant material that is not available anywhere else online.
Get the Full Details
The takeaway is that the St. Marys Daily Press obituaries are a solid starting point but they are not comprehensive. Use them early in your research to get names and dates, then move quickly to primary sources like death certificates and funeral home records. The microfilm at the county library is worth the trip if you have multiple names to look up, since the search tools are faster than trying to manually scan through scanned pages one by one. And if the notice you need is not there, assume it ran elsewhere and cast your search wider before you assume the person simply was not remembered locally.
