How The Morning Call Changed Its Obituary Practice And What It Means For Researchers
The Morning Call in Allentown ran printed obituary sections every morning for decades. Families paid for them. The paper made money from them. It was a straightforward business until it wasn't. The shift started around 2019 and accelerated through 2022 when the print run shrank significantly. I first noticed the change when a contact of mine tried to place an obituary and was told the minimum word count had doubled and the price went up roughly forty percent. That was the signal that the section was being squeezed. What actually changed was not just the price. The editorial team that used to write obituaries from submitted family notes was largely eliminated. Families now had to submit full drafts themselves or pay significantly more for staff assistance. The papers stopped running the two-page Saturday obituary spread that used to exist. Instead, most notices moved to the website, where they stayed visible but were harder to find without searching specifically. I ran into a specific problem last year when trying to track down a death notice for someone who died in November 2021. The print version from that week was not digitized in any accessible database. The family had submitted the obituary through the old process with a photo, and the paper had published it in the standard format. When I went to the Morning Call website to find it, the notice was gone. The site archives only go back a limited time for their free section, and the paid archive lookup tool required a subscription that most casual researchers do not maintain. The workaround was filing a public records request through the Lehigh Valley's open records portal. The newspaper is a private company but their records are technically subject to disclosure for documented research purposes. It took six weeks and a $75 fee to get a PDF copy of that specific page. I learned from that experience to always save the physical paper or at least take a screenshot when something important appears.
Here is the practical side most people miss. The Morning Call obituaries before the cutbacks were actually one of the better regional sources in Pennsylvania because the staff writers did a decent job of filling in biographical gaps from public records. They would cross-reference social security death indexes and local census data that families often forgot to mention. Once the staff writers were let go, the quality of the published pieces dropped noticeably. The submissions are still accurate but they are thinner. You get the bare facts rather than a complete life summary. This matters if you are doing genealogical research because those omitted details—middle names, specific military ranks, maiden names of siblings—are exactly the kind of things that trip up family tree builders later. The digital transition created another issue. The website version of obituaries does not include the same metadata that the print version had. In the printed paper, obituaries were categorized by date, section, and page number. The online versions are tagged with a timestamp but not consistently indexed. If you are searching for someone who died on a particular date and the name is slightly misspelled, the search algorithm often returns nothing useful. I recommend using the Lehigh Valley Public Library's genealogy databases instead, which include newspaper archives with better search functionality. Ancestry.com also has a Pennsylvania newspaper collection that includes some Morning Call obituaries, though the coverage is incomplete and skips years intermittently. The downsides of relying on the current system are real. The paywall for full online archives starts at about twelve dollars a month, which adds up. The print version is no longer a reliable source because it is now abbreviated. There is no guaranteed retention policy for online content beyond what the newspaper itself decides to keep, and we have seen multiple instances where older notices were removed without notice. If you need documentation for legal or genealogical purposes, request a certified copy directly from the newspaper's archives department before the notice ages out of easy access. The turnaround is typically three to four business days and the cost is usually between twenty and thirty dollars per request.
For anyone doing serious research on Lehigh Valley deaths between 1995 and 2020, the best approach is to pull together three sources: the printed microfilm at the Allentown Free Library (which has the full run through 2018), the newspaper's own paid archive, and the Pennsylvania State Archives death index. Cross-referencing all three will catch the notices that slipped through digitization gaps or were quietly removed from the website. The old system worked because it was redundant. The current system is fragile and easy to lose track of if you are not methodical about it. I keep a folder of saved obituary PDFs from the Morning Call going back to 2016. Most of them are from before the big changes. Reading through them now shows a clear pattern of declining length and detail. The ones from 2014 average about four hundred words with multiple paragraphs. The ones from 2023 average around two hundred words with bare facts. That is the actual state of the record now. It is not dramatic. It is just a fact that affects anyone who relies on these publications for accurate biographical information.
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