Why You Should Be Looking at These Obituaries
The Morning Call has been publishing obituaries in Allentown since the late 1800s, and the archive is genuinely useful if you are doing family history research or local historical work. Most people don't realize how much ground information sits in these pages. I spent roughly three weeks last year tracking down birth records for a client's great-grandmother, and the obituary file ended up being the only place where the mother's maiden name and the exact birth town were mentioned together. The Morning Call obituary collection is split between two main sources. The modern section, roughly from the early 2000s onward, is available through the newspaper's website and several subscription genealogy databases like Ancestry and Newspapers.com. The older material requires a different approach entirely. For pre-digitized content, the primary physical archive lives at the Allentown Public Library's Moravian Collection on South Cedar Street. They hold the microfilm and bound volumes going back well over a century. I usually recommend starting your search online to identify the approximate date range, then going physical for anything before 1995. The digital indexes for that period are incomplete, and searching by name alone through a keyword box will miss half the relevant results because obituaries were often filed under death date rather than name in the early index systems.
The Enduring Legacy Of The Morning Call Obits Allentown Pa A Treasure Trove Of History And Memory
What makes this collection particularly valuable compared to other regional papers is the depth of the local Moravian community records that get cross-referenced. Allentown has a dense population of German-American families whose church records sometimes diverge from civil records. The obituaries often include details that reconcile those gaps, like listing a birth in Bethlehem when the civil certificate says Easton, or noting a middle name that matches a godparent from the Moravian baptismal records. I ran into a specific problem last year where a client's grandfather was listed in the 1942 obituary index under the wrong first name. The son had anglicized it years earlier, so the index entry used the formal version while everyone in the family knew him by the shortened version. The workaround was straightforward once I knew to look for it: I pulled the funeral home imprint at the bottom of the actual obituary page, identified which agency handled the arrangements, and cross-referenced the date with the Social Security Death Index using the formal name. That confirmed the identity within twenty minutes. Without the obituary's inclusion of the father's full name and the wife's maiden name, the mismatch would have stalled the whole search.
Practical Search Strategies
Start with a death date range, not just a name. The Morning Call's indexing quality improves significantly when you narrow by year. Obituaries from 1970 to 1990 tend to be the most informative in terms of biographical detail. Earlier ones are shorter and sparser. Later ones after 2005 are more standardized and sometimes include less genealogical information because the newspaper shifted toward paid advertisement formats. When you are searching digital databases, use wildcard operators if the platform supports them. Names like "Schmidt" have numerous spelling variants across these records. Trying every possible spelling manually wastes time. Also pay attention to the society pages. Family death announcements and memorial service notices sometimes appear separately from the main obituary and can contain different details, especially for people who died out of town but had strong Allentown ties.
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Limitations You Need to Know
This archive is not comprehensive. People who died and were buried outside Lehigh County sometimes had their deaths reported in other papers, meaning their Allentown connections go unrecorded here. Economic hardship during the Depression and World War II resulted in noticeably shorter or absent obituaries for some families who simply could not afford the print space. There are entire blocks of streets in the South Side where obituary coverage drops off sharply between 1932 and 1946. If you are researching ancestors from that period and area, do not treat a missing obituary as proof of death elsewhere. It might just mean the family couldn't pay for it. Another issue is the transition to digital-only format. Somewhere around 2013 or 2014, The Morning Call changed its online obituary retention policy. Some older digital entries were dropped or made inaccessible without a subscription to a specific archive package. If you find a reference to an obituary from that era that no longer loads on the current site, the content may still exist on microfilm at the library or in the bound volumes at the historical society.
What You Can Actually Extract
Beyond the obvious dates, the obituaries consistently contain parents' names, siblings, surviving children and grandchildren, marital history including previous marriages, occupation and workplace, military service with rank and unit, church affiliation, and sometimes the specific neighborhood or street where the person lived. The workplace detail is especially useful for tracing labor history in the Lehigh Valley's manufacturing sector. Several obituaries mention the specific factory or plant, which maps directly onto company histories that are otherwise hard to access. If you are building a timeline or verifying family relationships, these pages tend to be more accurate than census records for immediate family members because they were provided by living relatives rather than recorded by a federal enumerator who may have misheard or guessed at relationships. That said, relatives sometimes omitted inconvenient information or got relationships wrong, so treat the content as a starting point rather than a final authority.
Where to Access the Material
The Allentown Public Library's Moravian Collection at 311 S. Cedar Street holds the physical archive. Research hours are limited, so call ahead to confirm availability of the microfilm rolls you need. The Lehigh County Historical Society also maintains related materials and may assist with targeted lookups. For digital access, Newspapers.com has the strongest coverage of The Morning Call obituary section, followed by Ancestry's newspaper collection. Neither is complete for the pre-1950 period, but both are worth checking before committing to a library visit. The collection is understaffed relative to demand. During peak genealogy seasons, wait times for microfilm readers can stretch past an hour. Going on a Tuesday morning is usually the least crowded window. Bring your own SD card or camera if the library allows it, since copying rights vary by roll and some older microfilm degrades to the point where photography produces unreadable results.
