Why I Started Looking Into County Obituaries
I moved to Franklin a few years back, and one of the first things people do when they settle in a small Pennsylvania county is start reading the funeral notices. It sounds morbid, but it isn't really. It's how you learn who lived here, who they were related to, and what churches or organizations held them together. The Venango Explorer runs these consistently, and the county records behind them tell a story that Wikipedia won't touch. There is a project people sometimes refer to as The Faces Of Venango County Exploring The Obituaries Of The Venango Explorer. It isn't a single formal database with a press release. It's more of a community-driven effort where residents, genealogists, and local historians have been pulling obituary text from the Explorer's print and online editions and making them searchable over time. Some of it lives on Facebook groups. Some of it is on FamilySearch indexes. A few people have their own spreadsheets they share when asked nicely.
The Faces Of Venango County Exploring The Obituaries Of The Venango Explorer
If you are trying to use this material, the first thing you need to understand is that no single download button exists. The content is scattered across the Venango Explorer archives, the Franklin Library's local history room, and various genealogical volunteer projects. That changes how you approach it, and honestly, it makes the work more interesting than it would be if everything were neatly packaged. The Venango Explorer is a weekly newspaper based in Franklin, Pennsylvania, covering Venango County. Obituaries run several times a week, usually submitted by funeral homes or family members. The paper has an online archive, but accessing older content behind the paywall requires a subscription. The current digital archive goes back a handful of years, maybe eight or nine, depending on how you count. Before that, you are looking at print microfilm or scans someone has already put up elsewhere. The Venango County Courthouse keeps death records, but those are vital records and not the same as newspaper obits. An obituary often includes surviving family, military service, church affiliation, and cause of death in a narrative form. A death certificate is colder. It has dates, occupations, and informant names, but it does not usually tell you who the family rallied around or what the person did on a Tuesday morning. For genealogy, the obituary is usually more useful unless you are doing strict statistical work.
How I Actually Pull The Data
My workflow starts with the Venango Explorer website. I search by name, but the site search is basic. Sometimes I search by surname alone and scan through results. If I find something useful, I note the date and page number. For recent issues, I can pull the full text directly. For older issues, I cross-reference with FamilySearch or FindAGrave. Both sites have user-contributed obituary transcriptions for Venango County, and they are hit or miss. Some are accurate. Some have the wrong birth year or swapped first names. When I need volume, I download the PDF versions of the newspaper when they are available. The Explorer posts recent editions online as PDFs. I use a tool like Adobe Acrobat or a free alternative to extract the text, then I filter for obituary sections. The layout changes from month to month, which is the first thing that trips people up. Sometimes the obits are grouped on a single page labeled "Obituaries." Sometimes they are spread across the news section with no clear header. I learned this the hard way when I spent two hours searching a month's worth of papers expecting a dedicated section that did not exist in that particular layout. After extraction, I clean the text. Funeral home formatting, phone numbers, and service details get stripped out. I keep names, dates, locations, survivors, and predeceased relatives. I save everything into a spreadsheet with columns for full name, date of death, source URL, issue date, and any notes. This takes about twenty minutes per month of papers if I am being careful. The first time I did it, it took me three hours because I was still figuring out the layout changes.
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Edge Cases I Ran Into
One problem that comes up constantly is married women listed under a husband's name rather than their birth name. In Venango County obituaries from the 1970s through the 1990s, it is common to see a woman listed as "Mrs. John Smith" with no maiden name in the headline. The body of the obituary may mention her birth surname, or it may not. I solved this by cross-referencing the spouse's obituary, which often lists the wife by her full name, and by checking census records or marriage licenses at the courthouse. The Venango County Prothonotary office has marriage records going back well over a century, and they are public. Going there in person is faster than ordering copies online, but you need a valid reason to access some older files depending on how the clerk is feeling that day. Bring your ID and be polite. The records are there for anyone who asks properly. Another issue is nicknames and middle names. I tracked down a man who appeared in three different obituaries under three different name variations before realizing they were the same person. One used his middle name, one used a nickname from high school, and one used the name on his military record. I stopped assuming the variants were different people and started keeping a mental running list of known aliases for anyone I research locally. It saved me weeks of duplicate work.
Free Resources Worth Using
FamilySearch has a Venango County obituary collection that is largely transcription-based. It is free to search, and you can create an account to save results. The quality varies by volunteer, so verify anything you find against the original paper if possible. FindAGrave is useful for burial location and cemetery transcriptions, and many graves in Venango County have detailed markers that include service history and family connections. The Franklin & Venango County Historical Society also holds collections that include clippings and personal papers. They are not fully digitized, but they are accessible to researchers who visit. The Venango County Court Common Pleas and Register of Wills keep probate records. These are separate from obituaries but often reference the same families. If you are building a file on someone, pulling the probate docket after finding their obituary usually adds estate details, executor names, and property references that flesh out the timeline significantly.
What This Approach Cannot Do
Obituaries are not complete. They skip people who died alone without family to write the notice. They skip people whose families could not afford the word count. They skip people whose families chose privacy. Venango County has plenty of those cases, especially in industrial towns where mill closures hit hard and people disappeared from public records quietly. If your goal is a complete demographic picture of the county, obituaries will give you a biased sample that skews toward families with means and social connection. Another limitation is that the online archive of the Venango Explorer is incomplete for older content. Before digitization, paper copies degrade. Some issues are missing entirely from library holdings. I found gaps in the late 1980s that I could not fill through any local source. Microfilm at the state archive in Harrisburg sometimes has copies, but you have to travel there or pay someone to look it up. It is not a major blocker for most research, but it is worth knowing about before you assume every death from that era is recorded somewhere accessible.
Practical Next Steps
If you want to start building your own index, begin with the last five years of the Explorer's online archive since it is fully searchable. Work backward month by month. Save each obituary to a folder named by year and month. Keep the original PDF as a backup even after you transcribe the text. Layouts change, and you will thank yourself later when a transcription error needs verification against the source. Use the courthouse for marriage and probate records once you have a name and approximate date. The Franklin Public Library's local history desk can also point you toward vertical file clippings that predate the online archive. The Faces Of Venango County Exploring The Obituaries Of The Venango Explorer is less a single tool and more a way of doing local history that pays off if you put in the upfront work. The records exist. They are just not organized the way a modern app would organize them. You bring the organization, and the county fills in the rest.
