Working With Local Newspaper Obituaries: A Practical Guide
I spend more time than I care to admit digging through microfilm archives and digitized newspaper databases. The Gary Indiana Posttribune runs obituaries that are sometimes just two paragraphs and other times full-page features with paid condolences from half the Midwest. Both formats are useful if you know how to read them. The Posttribune serves the Gary, Indiana area, which means most obituaries reflect a population with deep ties to steel, manufacturing, and the broader Chicago commuter corridor. That matters when you are doing genealogy work or local history research because it tells you something about family migration patterns without you having to chase down census records first. People who died in Gary in the 1970s and 1980s often list birthplaces in Alabama, Georgia, or Mississippi, which tracks with the Great Migration. The obituary is giving you a migration map in plain text. Most of the Posttribune archives are available through Newspapers.com and the Indiana State Library's digitized newspaper collection. Some records from the early 2000s show up on GenealogyBank, but coverage there is spotty for obituaries specifically. The Tribune's own site used to host an archive but they migrated to Indystar's platform and the older content gets buried pretty fast. Your best bet is going straight to the subscription database level rather than trying to google individual names.
I ran into a real problem last year where I needed a death date for someone who died in Gary around March 2003. The digital archive on Newspapers.com had gaps from late February through mid-March that year. Turns out there was a scanning backlog and the issues just weren't uploaded for about eight months. I found the obituary by checking the Indiana Historical Society's microfilm holdings at their West Lafayette facility, pulling the actual April 2003 volume, and photographing the page myself. It took three hours of travel time but the record was there and it matched the death certificate exactly. Here is what most people miss when they start pulling obituaries like this. The printed version and the online version are frequently different. The Posttribune routinely edits obituaries before publishing. Families submit drafts through funeral homes, and the newspaper trims them, removes certain survivors, or reorders the family listing. If you need an authoritative list of survivors, cross-reference the obituary against the death certificate or the funeral home record. The obituary is a promotional piece, not a legal document. It has been for decades and that has not changed. Another thing that catches people off guard is the way Gary obituaries handle names. Suffixes like Jr. and II are inconsistently applied across different decades. A man listed as "Robert Lee Smith Jr." in a 1995 obituary might appear as "Robert L. Smith" in his 1948 birth record. The middle name drop happens frequently in the later editions. You need to allow for abbreviation drift when building a family tree from these sources alone. Pair them with social security numbers from the index when available.
If you are doing this research on a tight budget, start with the Lake County Public Library system. They provide free access to Newspapers.com at most branches and the reference librarians there actually know how to navigate the newspaper databases. I have seen people pay for individual database subscriptions who could have gotten the same results by making one trip to the Hobart branch. The library also holds the Gary Post-Dispatch morgue files for pre-merger content, which covers some of the earlier decades that the Tribune does not digitize well. The major limitation of relying on these obituaries is selection bias. Not everyone in Gary gets a Posttribune obituary. People who died in institutions, those without nearby family to place the notice, and residents of unincorporated areas sometimes get minimal coverage or none at all. If your subject falls into one of those categories, the absence of an obituary is itself data. Check the Lake County Health Department death records and the Indiana Department of Health vital statistics archive. Those are public records and they do not discriminate based on whether a family could afford a newspaper notice. I typically budget about forty-five minutes per obituary search when the name and approximate date are clear. When the information is vague, it can take three to four hours to narrow down the right person across multiple issues. Having the funeral home name from the initial record cuts that search time down significantly because the Posttribune usually notes which funeral service arranged the details.
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