The Daily Press Obituaries Of Escanaba Mi A Window Into The Lives Of The Upper Peninsulas Respected Citizens

Reading Between the Lines of Local Obituaries

I spent about three years doing genealogy work for clients whose families came out of Delta County and the surrounding UP areas. A lot of that meant sifting through the microfilm at the library, pulling The Daily Press Obituaries Of Escanaba Mi A Window Into The Lives Of The Upper Peninsulas Respected Citizens to piece together family trees that public records alone couldn't fill. Most people don't realize how much actual information sits in those columns beyond names and dates. The obits are short. Usually two or three paragraphs. You get the service time, the surviving relatives, maybe a line about where they worked or what church they attended. That's it. But if you know what to look for, the details add up fast.

The Daily Press Obituaries Of Escanaba Mi A Window Into The Lives Of The Upper Peninsulas Respected Citizens

Here's how I went about using them systematically. First, I'd pull the obit from the paper and transcribe everything verbatim into a spreadsheet. Not summaries. Every name, every relationship, every location mentioned. I started early on with the habit of noting the exact wording around survivors. Phrases like "survived by" versus "preceded in death by" matter because they tell you who was still alive at the time and who wasn't. That distinction saves you from going down the wrong branch on a family tree. The format changed over the decades, which is something to watch for. In the seventies and eighties, obits tended to list the deceased's occupation, union membership, and military service in a pretty straightforward way. By the nineties, families started including more personal details—favorite hobbies, volunteer work, even pet names sometimes. The shift isn't random. It reflects a broader cultural change in how people wanted to be remembered, but for researchers it just means you can't assume consistency across time periods. I ran into a specific problem a couple of times that I didn't see coming. The paper sometimes published two versions of the same obit. A shorter one in the Thursday print edition and a longer one online or in a Sunday insert. The online version would often have additional survivor names or a different employer listed. If you're only pulling from one source, you're missing data. My workaround was simple: I started checking both the archived print copies on microfilm and any digital versions on the newspaper's website for the same date. When they differed, I logged both and flagged the discrepancy in my notes.

There are also edge cases with names that will trip you up. Married women in older obits are frequently listed only by their husband's name—"survived by her husband John Smith of Escanaba." Her maiden name doesn't appear in the obit itself. You have to cross-reference with census records or marriage licenses to find it. I learned that the hard way when I spent six weeks tracking down a great-aunt who apparently didn't exist under the name I was searching for. The obit only called her "Mrs. Robert Jenkins." Once I found her marriage record, I realized her birth certificate listed her as Margaret Thoresen. Three days of dead ends that could have been an afternoon if I'd known to look for that pattern sooner. Another thing most people miss: the funeral home attribution at the bottom of the obit. Companies like Johnson Funeral Home, Heritage Life Chapel, and earlier establishments like O'Brien's all handled different parts of the UP. The funeral home name can point you toward the geographic area where the family lived. More importantly, some funeral homes kept client files that included copies of the obits they wrote. I've pulled records from a couple of those files that had extra information the family added later but didn't make it into the printed version. If you're serious about using these effectively, here's the practical workflow I ended up settling on:

Start with the Death Index from the Michigan Department of Public Health. That gives you the exact death date and place, which you then match against the obit. Sometimes there's a discrepancy of a day or two between the death date on file and the date mentioned in the obit. The obit usually references the funeral service date, not the death date, so that's a common source of confusion. Next, cross-reference with SSDI records and Michigan death certificates. The death certificate will have the parents' names, which obits rarely include. That's the single biggest gap in obituary research that official records fill. Then build out the family structure using the survivor lists. Start with the closest relations—spouse, children, parents—and work outward to siblings, in-laws, and more distant relatives. Each new name is a search term for the next layer of records.

There are real limitations to this approach, and I should be blunt about them. The Daily Press obits only cover Escanaba and the immediate surrounding area. If your ancestor lived in Marquette or Sault Ste. Marie, you're looking at completely different newspapers. The obituary style in those papers is different too. Marquette's papers tend to be more detailed, while smaller paper obits in places like Menominee or Iron Mountain are often abbreviated to the point of being nearly useless for genealogy. Another limitation is that not everyone in the community got a substantial obit. People who died alone, without close family, or from backgrounds that didn't align with the paper's typical readership often received extremely terse notices. I've seen entries that were literally two sentences long. In those cases, you need to pivot to other sources—cemetery records, probate files, or hospital death registers—to get anything meaningful. The biggest pitfall I see people make is treating obits as factual statements rather than curated documents. Families write or commission these. They decide what gets included and what gets left out. Divorces, estrangements, second marriages, children given away for adoption—none of that shows up in an obit unless the family chooses to mention it. If a son isn't listed as a survivor, don't assume he died. He might have simply not been spoken to in twenty years. I've seen that play out more than once.

For digital access, the best route is the University of Michigan Library's newspaper archive, which has digitized issues of The Daily Press going back to the early 1900s. It's free with a UMich login, and anyone can get one. The search interface lets you filter by date range and keyword, which makes finding a specific obit significantly faster than scrolling through microfilm. The Michigan Historical Center also has some scanned copies available through their digital repository, though the coverage isn't as complete. Some commercial sites like Ancestry and HeritageQuest have extracted obituaries, but the indexing is inconsistent. I've found obits on those platforms that weren't there at all, and conversely, obits in the paper that were never uploaded. Don't rely on them as primary sources. Use them as pointers, then verify against the original. One more thing that matters more than people think: pay attention to the classified section on the same page as the obit. Sometimes families placed separate memorial cards or acknowledgment notices that contained additional information not included in the main obituary. I've picked up on burial location details and church affiliation that way that weren't in the obit itself.

If you're just getting started, pick one ancestor and do the full process—transcribe the obit, pull the death certificate, trace the survivors, check for multiple versions. It takes about an hour for a straightforward case. Once you've done one end to end, the patterns become obvious and the work speeds up considerably. After that first one, most subsequent obits take maybe fifteen minutes to process because you start recognizing the recurring names, the local surnames that show up across multiple families, the churches and employers that come up again and again. The obits aren't going to give you everything. They're a starting point, sometimes a solid one, sometimes barely adequate. But treated with the right level of scrutiny and cross-referenced against official records, they're one of the most underused tools in UP genealogical research. Most people stop at the name and date. The useful information is in what's between the lines.