Why I Spent Three Weeks Digging Through Pittsburgh Gazette Obituaries
I was trying to track down a great-uncle who supposedly died in the Steel District around 1953. Standard enough request. His name was Raymond Kowalski, and he didn't show up in any of the usual genealogy databases. So I went to the Pittsburgh Gazette archives. What I found was not simple. The Pittsburgh Gazette was a daily paper that ran from 1864 to 1993, when it folded into the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The obituaries are scattered across microfilm, some digitized through Heritage Microfilm and a few surviving copies sitting in the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library Special Collections. Most people don't realize the Gazette actually published two separate obituary sections on different days of the week, which means a search based only on one schedule will miss roughly a third of relevant entries. Here is how the process works if you are actually going to do this yourself. Start by identifying the approximate date range. The Gazette obituary format changed significantly in 1972 — before that, they were shorter and less structured. After that, you get full biographical sketches with funeral home information. This matters because a 1953 obituary for Raymond Kowalski might list just a name, death date, and surviving family members. A 1980 one could include employer, church affiliation, and burial location. Know which era you are searching before you start.
I used the Heritage Microfilm online catalog first, which indexes certain years of the Gazette between 1910 and 1960. It is searchable but incomplete — they digitized about 60% of the obituary column from that period, mostly from the Sunday edition. The weekday obituaries, which are actually more detailed, are underrepresented. When my initial search came up empty for Raymond, I flagged that gap and switched tactics. The workaround for the missing weekday content is going to the finding aid at the University of Pittsburgh. The Hillman Library has box-level inventory for the Gazette microfilm collection. You can request specific reel numbers by date. The process takes about three to five business days for interlibrary loan or on-site viewing. I requested reels covering March through June of 1953, and found Raymond's obituary on page 14 of the March 18 edition. He had died on March 12. The entry was small — four lines — but it confirmed his age, listed his wife as still living, and named his sister in Brighton, Massachusetts, which gave me a new lead to follow. There are pitfalls most researchers walk right into. The first is assuming the index is accurate. The Gazette used various editorial conventions over the decades. "d." meant died, "D" could mean deceased or daughter depending on context, and abbreviation standards shifted. I spent two days cross-referencing because I misread "J. Kowalski" as a male when it was likely Joan, Raymond's niece. Check the full article text every time, even if the index entry looks like a match.
A second pitfall is the spelling variations. Pittsburgh had massive immigration patterns, and surnames were frequently anglicized at publication. Kowalski appeared in one article as Kowalsky. In another context, I saw the family name recorded as Kovacs on a census, then back to Kowalski in the Gazette. Run phonetic searches and alternate spellings. The index does not do this for you. If you are looking for something more comprehensive than individual reel searches, the Pittsburgh City Directories from the same period can corroborate obituary information. Cross-referencing an obituary address with a city directory entry tells you whether the person moved between death and publication, or whether the family listed a wrong address. I once caught a case where the obituary listed a residence that had been condemned two years prior. The daughter who placed the notice was working from memory, not records. The main bottleneck with this archive is access cost. Heritage Microfilm charges per-hour lookup fees if you are not pulling the reels yourself. An on-site researcher at Hillman Library pays nothing beyond the standard library access fee, which is free for cardholders. The catch is that Hillman's reading room is closed weekends, and the microfilm machines only accept 16mm film. If you brought your own camera or scanner, you save money, but you also need to know the machine's light settings or you will get fogged frames that are unreadable.
Get the Full Details
For anyone doing serious work in these archives, I would recommend keeping a spreadsheet with columns for date, page number, column position, index entry, and full text transcription. The Gazette does not have a reliable full-text search across all years, so your own indexing becomes the tool they forgot to provide. It takes about twenty minutes per reel to transcribe effectively. A typical obituary search that might take a casual researcher six to eight hours of browsing can be reduced to two or three hours with a proper system in place. There are also some less-obvious resources tied to the Gazette. The funeral home notices that appeared in the Gazette were sometimes handled by agencies whose records survived independently. Moss Funeral Home and Shoenberger Funeral Home, both long-time Pittsburgh institutions, kept their own files that sometimes contained photographs, clergy names, and pallbearer lists that never made it into the newspaper. I found a letter in the Shoenberger files that identified Raymond's pastor as Father Thomas Corrigan at St. Maximilian Kolbe, which the obituary itself did not mention. That detail turned out to matter when I located parish records. If you cannot access physical archives, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's current digitized archive goes back only to about 2004. Anything before that is microfilm-only unless it was selectively scanned by a third-party vendor. FamilySearch has some Pittsburgh records, but their coverage of the Gazette specifically is thin. Ancestry's collection is similarly incomplete for this particular publication. The most reliable path remains either visiting Hillman Library in person or paying a research service that has direct microfilm access and understands the collection's structure.
The Gazette obituary files contain people who would otherwise be lost. Not just notable figures, but ordinary workers, immigrants, families who left little trace in official records. The paper was community-oriented by design, and the obituary section reflects that. You will find births, marriages, deaths, club memberships, military service, church attendance, and neighborhood affiliations all compressed into a handful of paragraphs. The information is there if you know how to look for it and how to handle the gaps.
