The Faces Of Hammond A Look At The Citys History Through Death Notices

How I Used Death Notices To Map Out Hammond's Past

Death notices are one of those records people overlook when they start researching local history. Most beginners go straight for census data or property deeds, but obituaries and death notices give you actual names of surviving relatives, places of birth, military service, church affiliations, and cause of death in a format that's easier to read than a civil registry entry. I spent about three months pulling death notices from the Hammond area to document what I eventually called The Faces Of Hammond A Look At The Citys History Through Death Notices. It wasn't a formal academic project. I just wanted to understand who lived here before my family showed up, and the local newspaper archives had exactly what I needed.

The Faces Of Hammond A Look At The Citys History Through Death Notices

The concept is straightforward. You take a geographic area, in this case Hammond, and you compile every death notice or obituary you can find within a given time range. Then you look for patterns. Who kept dying young. Which families appear across multiple decades. Where people were born before they settled here. That's essentially it as a methodology. The tricky part is finding the notices in the first place. In Hammond, the main sources are the Hammond Daily Star archives and the Lake County Public Library's local history microfilm collection. The library has death notices going back to the late 1800s on microfilm, but the microfilm reader is finicky. I spent two full mornings just trying to get the focus right on a 1912 scan. My workaround was bringing a small LED desk lamp and angling it so the glare didn't wash out the print. The librarians there didn't seem to care, which I appreciated because they have better things to do than troubleshoot your vintage equipment. One thing most people don't realize about death notices is that they're not consistently published the way we expect today. In Hammond, between 1900 and 1940, a death notice might appear one day or it might not appear at all depending on whether the family could afford the fee and whether the funeral home bothered to submit it. Some working-class deaths went entirely unnoticed in the paper. If you're building a complete record, you need to cross-reference with the Lake County Clerk's death registration files, which are more thorough but harder to access. Those require a formal research request and usually a same-day appointment at the recorder's office on Calumet Avenue. I learned that the hard way after driving up there unannounced on a Tuesday afternoon.

Another nuance that trips people up is the variation in how death notices were formatted over different eras. A notice from 1923 might list the deceased's mother's maiden name and three siblings. A notice from 1955 might just say "survived by wife and two children." Don't assume missing information means the person had no family. It means the newspaper stopped asking for those details as formatting got cheaper and more standardized. I also ran into a specific problem with the Hammond death notices from 1941 through 1945. A significant number of notices from those years are simply missing from the microfilm. The library staff told me the reels for that period had been damaged in a basement flood in the early 1980s and partially restored, but some pages didn't come back clear. I found about forty references to deaths in my cross-referencing that I couldn't verify from the original newspaper source. If you're doing this research, budget extra time for gaps and know that some records are just gone. The payoff comes when you start connecting the dots between notices. One pattern I found in Hammond was a cluster of Italian and Polish surnames appearing in death notices from the 1930s in the same neighborhoods where those same families showed up in the 1920 and 1930 census records. That tells you something about migration patterns and community formation that a single document never would. Another pattern was noticing that several death notices from the 1950s listed "Lake County Hospital" as the place of death, which tracked with when that facility opened and began serving the Hammond area exclusively instead of sending patients to Chicago.

If you want to try this yourself, here's what I'd suggest starting with. Get the microfilm guide from the Lake County Public Library's local history desk. It'll tell you exactly which reel numbers cover which years. Then budget at least a weekend for the first round of viewing. Copy or photograph each notice you find. The microfilm copies you get at the library are often too low resolution to read names clearly later. A decent smartphone camera against the microfilm screen works fine if you prop it steady and turn off the flash. For digitized sources, the Illinois Newspaper Project has some Hammond titles online through the University of Illinois, but the coverage is incomplete. I found about sixty percent of what I needed through their database and had to fill in the rest physically at the library. Don't waste too much time expecting everything to be searchable online. Many of these old notices haven't been OCR'd properly, so keyword searches often return nothing even when the notice exists in the database. The whole process of building out The Faces Of Hammond A Look At The Citys History Through Death Notices took me roughly eight weeks of part-time work. I ended up with around six hundred individual death notice entries spanning from 1889 to 1972. Some of those entries were just one line. Others were full column obituaries with biographical details. The spread varied enough that I spent most of my time just standardizing my data format rather than discovering anything shocking.

One practical tip that isn't obvious. When you're transcribing death notices, record the date the notice was published, not the date of death. They're often different. I made that mistake in my first week and had to go back and correct about thirty entries. The publication date is what matters for understanding what information was available to the community at a given time. There are limitations to this approach that you should accept upfront. Death notices only cover people who died in or near Hammond and whose families chose to place a notice. They skew toward people with enough money and social standing to publish. Immigrant communities that weren't well integrated into mainstream newspaper culture, poorer residents, and people who died far from home all appear less frequently. You're not getting a full demographic picture. You're getting a picture of who the newspaper decided was worth printing, which is still valuable but it's not the whole story. If you want a more complete record, combine this with county vital records and cemetery transcriptions. The Hammond area has several old cemeteries with inscriptions that predate the earliest newspaper death notices. Calumet Park Cemetery and Forest Home Cemetery both have recorded burials from the 1870s that fill in some of the gaps. But those sites have their own access issues. Calumet Park is mostly filled now and requires coordination with the cemetery association for detailed records. Forest Home has portions that are overgrown and difficult to read. Going physical at those sites is time-consuming and sometimes disappointing.

I don't have a download link for any ready-made database because I never compiled mine into a shareable format. The research was personal. But if you reach out to the Lake County Genealogical Society, they may already have someone working on a similar project for the Hammond area. They meet monthly and their newsletter occasionally mentions ongoing transcription work. It's worth checking before you start from scratch.