Understanding the Local Obituary Archive
The Star Gazette runs an obituary section that covers recent deaths in the area and maintains a searchable archive going back years. It is not a premium product. It sits on the newspaper's website and is updated daily when new notices are submitted by funeral homes or family members. I spent about three weeks navigating this system when I was trying to track down a death certificate reference for a client's family history project. The interface is functional but not intuitive. Here is what you need to know before you start searching. The search page lets you filter by last name, date range, and city. The default date range is set too narrowly, which caused me to miss two relevant entries on my first pass. I had to manually adjust the start date back to January 1st of the year in question. That detail matters more than it should.
Results show the full obituary text, the funeral home that filed it, and a link to order a printed copy if one exists. Some older entries from before 2018 are scanned images rather than searchable text. You can zoom and read them, but you cannot copy-paste from those pages. I worked around this by using a free OCR tool on the screenshot, which took about forty seconds per image. The subscription model is straightforward. Most obituaries are freely readable, but the archive goes deeper than what shows on the front page. Paid tiers unlock the full digitized run going back to the 1970s. If you only need something from the last six months, you likely will not hit a paywall. A thing people miss: the funeral home listings are cross-referenced. If you search by a specific funeral home, you get every notice they filed in the date range, including pieces that do not appear in standard name searches. That saved me when a relative used a smaller regional home that was not prominently featured on the homepage.
There are limits. The search does not handle middle initials well. I tried looking up "James R. Thornton" and got nothing, but "James Thornton" pulled the right record. It also struggles with hyphenated names. Enter the first part only if the second part is missing from results. Another edge case: some entries from rural counties get miscategorized under the nearest larger city. If your ancestor's obit does not show up under their actual town, try searching the county seat instead. I found a record this way that had been filed under the wrong municipality due to a data entry error at the funeral home. If you need documentation for legal or genealogical purposes, order the certified copy directly from the newspaper's archive desk rather than relying on the screen version. The process takes about five business days and costs roughly twenty-five dollars. You will need the full name, approximate date of death, and the funeral home name if you have it.
Get the Full Details
One more practical note. The site does not send email alerts for new obituaries in a specific name range. If you are tracking an active case or waiting for a particular person's notice, check manually every few days. I set a recurring calendar reminder for myself during active searches. Takes two minutes and beats missing something. The system is adequate for most researchers. It will not replace official vital records or cemetery databases, but it fills a gap that those sources leave open. Local obituaries contain details you will not find elsewhere: survivor names, military service notes, church affiliations, and the specific cemetery plot location. Those details matter when you are building out a family tree or verifying a lineage claim. If you run into errors or missing entries, the archive staff responds to emails within a couple of days. I have used that channel twice and both times got a useful reply rather than a form letter. Include as much identifying information as you can in the initial message. Vague requests get slower responses.
