Why the Star Press Still Matters When You Need to Remember Someone in Muncie
The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana has been publishing obituaries since long before anyone thought to put them online. If you are trying to find information about someone who recently passed away in Delaware County or the surrounding areas, this is still one of the most reliable places to start. It is not glamorous. It does not have the best website. But it has depth that other sources simply do not match for this particular region. Getting an obituary published in the Star Press involves a straightforward process, but there are details that can easily be missed if you are not familiar with how local papers operate. The first thing most people get wrong is timing. You need to coordinate with both the funeral home and the newspaper at the same time. The Star Press typically runs obituaries either the morning after they are submitted or two days later depending on the publication schedule. If you wait until the day of the service to call, you might miss the next available issue entirely and your family will be dealing with a delay nobody wants during an already stressful week. I learned this the hard way back in 2019 when my mother's cousin passed away and we were rushing everything. I assumed the funeral home handled the newspaper coordination. They did not. The obituary ended up running three days late because I had not confirmed the submission deadline directly with the paper. My workaround was simple but painful to figure out under pressure: I called the Star Press newsroom myself, asked for the obituary editor's direct line, and submitted the text via email with a note requesting confirmation of receipt. That email trail turned out to be critical when I needed to verify exactly when the piece was locked for printing.
The Practical Details That Actually Matter
Length is a factor most families do not anticipate. The Star Press charges by the line or by the inch depending on how the piece is laid out. A standard obituary runs roughly 150 to 250 words. Going longer means paying more and it also increases the chance that the editor will trim content during layout. I recommend drafting your obituary to about 200 words and keeping the most essential information in the first third of the piece. That way if space is tight, the biographical highlights survive even if the longer personal anecdotes get cut. Photos are another area where people run into trouble. The Star Press accepts digital photographs but the resolution requirement is stricter than most newspapers make clear upfront. They typically want images at least 300 DPI at the intended print size. A phone camera photo that looks fine on a screen will often print out blurry and unusable. Save yourself the headache and take a decent photo of the person you are remembering in good lighting and save it as a high-quality JPEG or TIFF. Aim for something at least 1200 by 1600 pixels if you want it to look acceptable in print.
Searching Archives and Researching Past Issues
If you are looking for older obituaries rather than placing a new one, the options are mixed. The Star Press has digitized some of its archives but not everything is online. Records before the early 2000s may only exist in physical microfilm at the Delaware Public Library or the historical society. The library staff are generally helpful but they do not have endless patience for people who show up expecting a full computer search of every name that ever appeared in the paper. A counter-intuitive thing to know: the microfilm reader machines at the library are often broken or poorly maintained. If you go there, bring a notebook and a pen because you cannot always rely on the printer function. Also, the indexes for certain years are arranged differently. Some months are indexed by first name, others by last name, and a few periods have no index at all. I spent an entire afternoon searching for a great-uncle in 1987 only to discover the microfilm for that quarter was mislabeled on the shelf. The workaround was to check the physical newspaper date directly on the roll instead of trusting the index card system.
Get the Full Details
What Actually Gets Included and What Often Does Not
Obituaries in the Star Press tend to follow a fairly standard formula for this region. They list the full name, age, city of residence, date of death, and a brief career summary. Surviving family members are listed, usually starting with the spouse and then children and grandchildren. Predeceased relatives get a single sentence near the end. Charity donation information and funeral service details come last. What rarely makes it into these pieces is any real substance about the person's character beyond the surface level. Most families I have worked with leave out the interesting parts because they assume the newspaper will only print what is required. That is not true. You can include hobbies, military service details, community involvement, and personal anecdotes. The real constraint is word count and the editor's preference for keeping things concise, not an explicit rule against personality. One common mistake I see repeatedly is the failure to specify the correct spelling of names in surviving family listings. A misspelled grandchild's name in an obituary is a real problem because that error then becomes part of the permanent public record. It shows up in genealogy databases, newspaper indexes, and any future search. Always read the proof copy carefully before the paper submits it for print. The Star Press typically sends a galley or digital proof for final review, but not every family takes the time to check it line by line. Do not skip that step.
The Limitations You Should Know About
The Star Press obituary section is not a comprehensive record of every death in the area. Some families choose not to place an obituary at all and rely on funeral home announcements instead. Others publish in regional papers like the Indianapolis Star or the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette and skip the local paper entirely. If you are researching an ancestor and the Star Press turns up nothing, it does not necessarily mean the person died elsewhere. It may mean the family made a different choice about where to publish. Another limitation is that the online archive is incomplete and the search functionality on the Star Press website is not reliable for anything older than about five or six years. Names sometimes fail to appear in search results due to formatting differences in the original digital upload. Cross-referencing with Find-a-Grave, Ancestry.com, or the Indiana State Library's digital newspaper collection is practically necessary for thorough research. No single source covers everything.
A Few Unpopular Opinions From Experience
First, the idea that you must spend hundreds of dollars on a paid obituary to do it right is largely false. A basic free or low-cost listing in the Star Press contains all the essential information most people need. Paid advertisements from funeral homes dominate the print edition but they are not the only way to honor someone. The actual newspaper obituary column is where the factual record lives. Focus your attention and budget there rather than on the glossy funeral home ads that fill the front of the section. Second, writing an obituary alone is harder than most people expect. You are grieving and trying to produce something coherent under time pressure. The best approach is to delegate the drafting to one family member while others provide facts and corrections. I have seen too many families try to collaborative edit a document while simultaneously dealing with funeral arrangements and it never goes smoothly. Pick one writer, give them the key details, and let them handle the prose. You can review it once before it goes to the paper. If you need to access the current Star Press obituary section, the newspaper's website at the starpress.com domain hosts recent listings. For anything older than the past several years, plan to visit the Delaware Public Library and request access to the microfilm collection. Call ahead to confirm which rolls are currently available since circulation issues sometimes pull items for restoration work.
