How to Navigate and Research The Boston Globe Obituaries for Family History and Local Genealogy
The Boston Globe obituary archive is one of the most useful regional newspaper collections available online, but it is not intuitive. The search interface treats every field as a simple text box, the date filtering is rigid, and the digitized back catalog skips years in unpredictable patterns. I have spent more time than I care to admit wrestling with it. What follows is the method that actually works when you need to track down a specific notice or research a family line through the paper's death records. The obituary section runs daily and the digital archive dates back to around 2007. Earlier notices exist in microfilm or scanned PDF form but are not fully searchable through the public interface. If you are looking for someone who died before the mid-two-thousands, the online search will mostly return nothing, and you have to pivot to the physical archive at the Boston Public Library or request a scan through their newspapers department. The process takes about three business days and costs twenty-five dollars for digitization of up to ten pages. Factor that into your timeline if you are already working with a deadline. The search itself requires a particular sequence. Go to the Globe's obituary section and use the advanced search. Enter the full name in the first field. Leave the location field blank unless you are certain the person lived within the Greater Boston area at the time of death. The paper covers a wide metro region but its coverage drops off sharply past the suburban ring. Put in a broad date range first. Search for five years forward and backward from the suspected date of death. The system often mis-parses death dates that fall on holidays or near month boundaries, so you will get stray results that look close but are wrong. Narrow the range only after you confirm the correct person appears in the initial spread.
One thing nobody tells you about the archive is that the obituary text and the companion death notice are sometimes filed under different names or nicknames. I once searched for a woman who died under her married name, Eleanor Marsh, and found nothing until I realized the notice was filed under Elaine March, a childhood nickname she had reverted to after divorce. The workaround is to run wildcard-style searches. Drop the first name entirely and search just the last name plus the word "died" or "passed away" in the same year. It floods the results, but it surfaces notices that strict name matching misses. You then scan manually for the right person. It takes longer upfront but saves hours of dead-end queries later. The death date field uses American date formatting, but the archive indexes it loosely. If you enter 03/05/1998, the system might interpret that as May 3rd instead of March 5th depending on how the original metadata was tagged. Always verify the actual date shown on the notice itself rather than trusting the search result snippet. The snippet often pulls from a machine-translated index line that can be off by a few days. For genealogical work, the most valuable detail in a Globe obituary is the list of surviving family members. These are usually standardized. The format lists spouse, children, grandchildren, and sometimes siblings in order. I keep a spreadsheet that captures each person's name, relationship, and any included locations like "of Cambridge" or "now of Naples, FL." That last part matters because out-of-state moves often reveal where relatives relocated and can unlock records in other counties. Without tracking those geographic hints, you lose a useful leads trail.
There are real limitations to this archive that beginners tend to underestimate. The full-text search does not include the photographs that accompany many modern obituaries. If a notice has a picture, the image itself is not searchable by OCR. I learned this the hard way when trying to find an obituary that mentioned a middle name only visible in the printed photo caption. The workaround is to search the text first, open the notice, and then check the image. The site loads the high-resolution version slowly on older browsers, so use Chrome or Firefox rather than Safari for this step. Another bottleneck is that not all obituaries from the early digital years are complete. Notices from 2007 through 2011 sometimes have truncated text or missing paragraphs due to formatting errors during the original scan. The missing sections are usually the biographical narrative and leave only the bare survivor listing. If you need the fuller story, check whether the person also published through a funeral home's website or a local alternative paper like the Boston Phoenix, which ran its own death notices during overlapping years. Those supplements are now archived separately and can fill gaps. If you are doing this research for legal or estate purposes, keep in mind that the Globe obituary is not a primary source for dates of death. The official death certificate comes from the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records. Use the obituary to confirm approximate dates and family connections, then request the certificate using the name and city listed in the notice. The state charges a processing fee and typically delivers the record within two weeks for standard mail requests.
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The archive also does not include every death in the coverage area. Smaller towns and newer suburbs sometimes have their notices picked up by county papers first. If a search in the Globe returns nothing for a known death in a town like Watertown or Revere, try the corresponding local paper. The Boston Herald and the Metro West Daily News carry overlapping coverage and their archives use a different search platform with different quirks. The Herald's archive, for example, includes a crude keyword filter that responds better to misspellings, which can be useful when dealing with old handwritten forms. For people building a family tree, the most efficient workflow is to start with the most recent generation and move backward. Obits from the last decade are fully searchable and complete. Working backward from there gives you the best results first and lets you confirm the correct family line before you hit the harder pre-two-thousand-eight territory. I usually pull five to ten notices at a time, export them as PDFs, and save them in folders labeled by surname and decade. The Globe allows PDF download for most notices, though you need a subscription for bulk access. A single-month subscription costs roughly twelve dollars and covers enough issues to pull a substantial set of records without breaking the budget. The search results page shows a maximum of fifty entries per query. If your target has a common surname, you will need to paginate through multiple pages and apply the date range filter before browsing. I have seen people waste an afternoon scrolling through result page four and five without narrowing the year first. Set the date filter early. It changes the entire result set and makes pagination manageable.
Finally, if you are researching an ancestor whose notice may have appeared in the Globe but was later removed or corrected, the archive generally retains an edited version rather than deleting it entirely. The correction is usually noted at the bottom of the notice in smaller print. I have encountered cases where a previously listed survivor was removed due to a family dispute, and the revised notice quietly dropped that name. Cross-reference multiple versions if they exist, and check the publication date stamp on each. The earliest version usually contains the most complete family information before edits were made.
