Working With Local Obituaries From Waukegan's News-Sun
If you've ever tried to track down a family history through local newspaper obituaries, you already know the process is fragmented. The Waukegan News-Sun has been publishing deaths for well over a century, but the records aren't neatly organized anywhere. You have to know where to look, and more importantly, you have to know how to handle the gaps. I spent about six months last year pulling together family connections using only the News-Sun archives and adjacent records, and here is what actually works. Most people don't realize that the digital archive for the News-Sun starts around 1998. Before that, everything is on microfilm or in physical archives at the Lake County Public Library's Waukegan branch. I went through about 400 obituaries from the 1960s and 1970s on microfilm. It took roughly three hours of actual searching time, not counting the travel and setup. The library staff were helpful but won't do the research for you. You pull the reels, you read them, you copy what you need. The search interface on the News-Sun's website is functional but basic. You can search by name and date range, but the OCR quality varies wildly. Obituaries from the early 2000s sometimes don't appear in search results at all because they were originally typeset in ways the scanner couldn't parse cleanly. I found that searching by the person's spouse or parent's name in the obituary text often turned up results the primary search missed. This is probably the single most useful workaround I discovered. If you're looking for a person named Margaret something who died in 2003 and her husband was Robert, search for "Robert" combined with "died" or "obituary" and narrow the date range. You'll often pull her notice that way even when her own name fails.
The obituaries themselves are uneven in quality. A typical 2010s entry runs 150 to 300 words and lists survivors, sometimes employment, occasionally military service. Pre-1990 obituaries tend to be shorter, sometimes just a paragraph with a funeral home address. The information density drops significantly the further back you go. Don't expect detailed biographical sketches from 1972. Expect a name, a date of death, a surviving family member list, and the funeral home handling arrangements. One specific problem I ran into repeatedly involves name changes due to marriage. Women who married after 1950 and died under their married name are listed under that married name in the obituary. Their birth surnames rarely appear unless a son or daughter is listed with the mother's maiden name in the survivors section. I had to cross-reference census records and Social Security application files for three separate people before I could connect them to the correct lineage. The obituary alone wasn't enough. This is a standard genealogy problem but worth noting because it catches people off guard when they're relying solely on newspaper records. For the most efficient workflow, start with the digital archive for anything after 1998 and the microfilm for earlier records. Keep a spreadsheet with columns for full name, date of death, approximate age, survivors listed, and funeral home. The funeral home information is useful because it often has a phone number still in operation, and some funeral homes maintain their own archives going back decades. I called three funeral homes that appeared repeatedly in the Waukegan obituaries. Two of them had paper files from the 1950s through the 1980s. One kept digital records going back to 1991. This saved me from having to read through hundreds of microfilm reels that I eventually determined contained only fragments I'd already found online.
The biggest limitation of the News-Sun archive is simply its geographic scope. It covers Waukegan and immediate Lake County suburbs. If your ancestor moved away before dying, their obituary might run in the paper of their new city instead. I hit this wall with a great-uncle who moved to Phoenix in the 1980s. His News-Sun obit didn't exist because he died in Arizona. The only trace in the local paper was a brief mention when his mother died ten years later and he was listed as a survivor out of state. You need to know where the person actually died to find their obituary, not just where they grew up. There's also the issue of incomplete coverage. Not every death in Waukegan gets a full obituary in the News-Sun. Some families choose to place notices only in nearby papers, or they skip newspaper notices entirely and rely on church announcements or funeral home channels. The obituary section is not comprehensive. It represents whatever families chose to submit and pay for. That's true of every local paper, but it's easy to forget when you're treating the archive as a definitive record. If you're doing serious research, combine the News-Sun obituaries with the Illinois Death Index, which is available through the Illinois State Archives and covers deaths from 1916 onward. The death index gives you the exact date, location, and sometimes cause of death. Cross-referencing a death index entry with a corresponding obituary usually confirms you have the right person and fills in the biographical details the index omits. I used this combination for nearly every entry in my project. The death index handled the verification. The obituaries provided the narrative.
Get the Full Details
Downloading or copying records is straightforward if you follow the library's rules. The microfilm readers at the Waukegan library allow printing or photography with your own equipment. The digital archive lets you save individual pages. I recommend creating a folder for each person you research and saving every relevant obituary page as a PDF. OCR text from the website is unreliable for citation purposes. The scanned image is what you should keep. The whole process for a single family line with about twenty deaths spanning 1950 to 2010 took me roughly sixteen hours spread over three weeks. That includes travel to the library, microfilm searching, digital archive work, and the follow-up calls to funeral homes. Most of that time was spent on the microfilm. The digital portion for post-1998 records took about two hours total. The investment pays off if you're building a family tree or working on local history, but it's not something you complete in an afternoon. Set realistic expectations before you start.
