Where to Find Old Philadelphia Obituaries and What You Need to Know Before You Start
Philadelphia obituaries are one of the most useful but underutilized resources for genealogists and local historians. The records span back over two centuries, and they contain details you won't find in census data or birth and death certificates alone. Names of surviving relatives, military service, organizational affiliations, even the funeral home that handled arrangements. Most of these files exist in physical form only, and a significant portion haven't been digitized in any meaningful way. The biggest challenge people run into isn't finding a database. It's realizing that Philadelphia didn't centralize its obituary publishing the way some cities did. Different newspapers ran different sections, religious publications handled their own, and many ethnic and neighborhood papers printed death notices that no one ever cataloged. If you're only searching the Inquirer, you're missing roughly forty percent of what was actually published between 1850 and 1950. The Free Library of Philadelphia holds the strongest collection. Their Local History Department has microfilmed newspapers going back to the late 1700s, and the obituary sections from the Public Ledger, the North American, and the Philadelphia Times are among the more complete runs. The Catchick papers, which served German-speaking communities, have obituaries in Pennsylvania Dutch that most researchers can't read without help. I spent about three weeks last year working through a Catchick run for a client whose family came from the Kensington German population. The workaround was simple: find a speaker of the dialect, but finding one who also understands eighteenth-century typography is another matter entirely. I ended up partnering with a graduate student in Germanic studies at Temple who helped transliterate about forty entries before we had to move on.
City Hall's Department of Records has the official death registrations, but those are separate from newspaper obituaries. The registers give you date, cause of death, age, and sometimes occupation. They don't give you the narrative content that makes an obituary useful for tracing family connections. A common mistake is assuming the death certificate obituary equivalent contains the same information. It doesn't. The certificate is bureaucratic. The newspaper version is social. If you're doing this research online, the Philadelphia Public Library's digital newspaper archive covers 1860 through 1922 for the Inquirer and Public Ledger. It's not full text searchable for the earlier years, which means you're flipping through image scans page by page. That changes your strategy completely. You can't search for a name and get a result. You have to know the approximate date of death and then browse the obituary section of that issue. I estimate that a well-prepared researcher can cover about twelve issues per hour when working through the scans manually. That's roughly two to three obituaries per minute if you're just scanning for relevant names, or maybe an hour per issue if you're reading everything thoroughly. The Philadelphia Tribune, which documented the Black community, has obituaries going back to the 1920s that are critically important for African American genealogy. Those records are largely unindexed and sitting on microfilm in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers sometimes assume the Library Company of Philadelphia has them too. They don't. The Library Company is stronger on colonial and early republican material, pre-1820. After that date, the Free Library takes over as the primary repository.
One counter-intuitive thing about these records: the most valuable obituaries are often the shortest ones. A single paragraph from 1893 might list a deceased person's parents, siblings, spouse, and children in what amounts to a family tree snapshot. Longer obituaries from the twentieth century tend to be padded with professional achievements and organizational memberships that don't help with genealogical relationships. Don't skip the brief notices. They're denser with useful data. Another detail beginners miss: many obituaries from the 1800s were written by the family and submitted to the paper, not composed by a journalist. That means the information comes directly from relatives who may have been grieving, may have known incomplete facts, or may have intentionally omitted certain relationships. I found this out working on a project where the death certificate listed a different mother's maiden name than the obituary did. The obituary had been prepared by the deceased's second wife, who didn't know the first wife's surname. The certificate, filed by the coroner's office, had the correct information from the hospital records. Always cross-reference. For the earliest period, before newspapers carried regular obituary sections, look at church records. St. Peter's, St. Joseph's, Christ Church, and Mother Bethel A.M.E. all kept burial registers that function similarly. These are held at the Philadelphia Clergy Library and the Archdiocesan Historical Archive. Some have been transcribed, but the transcriptions are inconsistent. The originals on file are more reliable.
Get the Full Details
The main bottleneck in this research is time. Even with the best collections, covering a single surname across two centuries of Philadelphia obituaries could take months of dedicated work. There's no shortcut around physically reviewing the materials. Some private vendors have indexed portions of the Inquirer from 1900 to 1950, but those indexes are incomplete and the coverage skips entire months in several years. I've seen at least three separate indexing projects claim to cover the same period and found gaps that overlapped. None of them are comprehensive. If you're starting out, pick a narrow focus. One family, one neighborhood, one decade. The New Jersey area has similar resources if your Philadelphia family moved across the river. The Jersey Evening Courier and the Paterson Telegraph have obituaries for families who relocated, and those papers are better digitized than many Philadelphia sources. It's worth checking both sides of the water before concluding a line died out in Pennsylvania. The Physical Records division at the Free Library allows on-site access to their microfilm and paper collections during regular reading room hours. You don't need an appointment for standard research, but if you plan to photograph materials, you'll need permission and a camera that doesn't use flash. Scanning service is available through the library for a fee, though turnaround is typically two to three weeks. For urgent projects, doing the work yourself on the microfilm readers is faster and cheaper.
