Working With Dubois County Obituary Records
I spend a lot of time helping people trace family lines through this county, and the obituary records here are genuinely useful if you know how to approach them. Most people treat them as death notices, but they contain genealogical gold if you read past the standard format. I am going to walk you through what is actually available, how to access it, and where the traps are. The Dubois County obituary collection spans several decades across multiple publications. The Evansville Courier Press carries coverage for residents who die in the area. There are also smaller papers like the Huntingburg Star-Journal and the Jasper Daily Banner that handled local deaths before digital records became standard. The main repository sits at the Dubois County Public Library, which maintains both microfilm and digitized PDFs going back to the late 1970s in most cases. Here is the workflow I use when I need to pull an obituary. Start with the library website. They have a paid database subscription that gives you full-text search across their obituary archive. The free catalog search on their site only returns metadata, so you will need the paid tier if you are doing serious research. I pay the annual fee for this alone because it saves hours compared to thumbing through microfilm.
If you are pulling a recent obituary from the last five years, try the newspaper websites directly. Both the Courier Press and local outlets run obituaries online through Legacy.com or their own archives. These are usually searchable by name and date. The library archive goes further back than the free online versions. I recently found a 1963 obituary for my great-uncle through the library database that did not show up in any free search engine result. It mentioned his wife's maiden name and his brother's location in Michigan, both details that would have cost me weeks of extra research to find otherwise. The biggest pitfall people run into is assuming every death gets an obituary. In Dubois County, not every deceased person receives one. Family finances, size of the social network, and simple oversight all play a part. I had a case where I was researching a woman whose parents and three siblings all had obituaries, but her own was missing entirely. The death certificate in the county clerk's office confirmed she died, but nobody filed or paid for an obituary. When that happens, you pivot to the Indiana State Board of Health death indexes, which are maintained at the county level and cross-reference with the newspaper archives. Another thing beginners miss is the formatting shift that happened around 2005. Before that, obituaries tended to be longer narrative pieces written by family members or close friends. After that, they became more formulaic, often drafted from templates by funeral homes and edited down to fit space constraints. The earlier obits contain significantly more raw information, including exact places of birth, church affiliations, military service details, and surviving relatives listed by name rather than just "survived by family."
If you need physical copies for legal or genealogical purposes, the library charges a small per-page fee for photocopies or offers scan-on-demand services. I always request the scan instead of the copy. The microfilm reads are usually clear enough to scan directly, and a digital file is easier to share with researchers or keep in your own archive. The fee difference is negligible, but the utility difference is real. There are also burial records at the county cemetery offices. Some of these, like the ones at New Paris Cemetery and Jasper's various plots, have recorded interment details that match up with obituary information. When an obituary says "services at St. Mary's Church," the cemetery record might confirm which section the person was buried in. Combining the two sources removes a lot of uncertainty, especially when multiple family members share the same name. The one area where this system falls apart is for deaths before the 1970s that were reported in papers which have not been fully digitized. Those records exist on microfilm at the library, but the equipment is aging, and some spools have degraded. I spent a full afternoon in 2023 trying to read a 1958 obituary that the microfilm had become too brittle to scan cleanly. The workaround was to contact the Indiana Historical Society, which holds parallel microfilm copies of some Indiana county newspapers, and they had a cleaner frame for that issue. It took three weeks and a phone call, but it worked.
Get the Full Details
For anyone starting out, the most efficient path is the library's paid online database. It covers the bulk of the useful record span, the search interface is functional, and you can save or export results directly. Skip the free microfilm browsing unless you have a very specific target that the database did not return. And always check the death certificate index alongside the obituary to catch the entries that never made it into print.
