Looking Through The Marietta Times Obituary Archives
The Marietta Times is a daily newspaper serving Marietta, Ohio and the surrounding Washington County area. Its obituary section has been running for decades, and the paper itself traces back to 1819. That means the records go further back than most genealogy sites cover. Finding them takes a different approach than searching Ancestry or Legacy.com. Most people start with the website, mariettatimes.com, and search the obituary archive there. It works for recent records. I'd estimate the online index covers roughly 2008 onward in a usable format. Before that, things get messy. The paper transitioned to digital gradually, and there are gaps in the microfilm digitization that you won't find documented anywhere. The key thing nobody tells you is that The Marietta Times uses a local publisher group called GateHouse Media, which later became part of Gannett. Their online archive platform went through a messy migration around 2019, and a significant number of older obituaries from the early 2010s simply vanished from the searchable interface. They may exist on microfilm but are completely unreachable through normal search. I ran into this when tracking a great-uncle who died in 2013. The obituary was referenced in a 2020 follow-up article, but the original couldn't be found online anywhere. I ended up requesting the microfilm through the Muskingum County Public Library system, and it was there, intact, on reel 47 of their Marietta Times collection.
If you're doing serious research, you need to understand the difference between what's indexed and what's actually available. The online search pulls from a digitized text index. It does not pull from the full-page image archive. That means if someone's name was spelled differently in the transcription versus the actual printed paper, you will miss it. I found three cases where a middle initial was dropped during digitization, making the person appear unsearchable by their full legal name. The workaround is to search by date range alone and manually scroll through every page in that week's obituary section. It's slow. For a typical week, that's maybe 8 to 12 pages of dense text. The physical archives at the Local History and Genealogy Department of the Muskingum County Public Library on Fifth Street in Marietta are the most reliable source. They hold the complete microfilm run going back to the 1800s. You can view the films on-site for free. They also have a clipping file database on a public computer terminal that indexes obituaries by surname before the microfilm era. That clipping file is handwritten and typed indexes on manila folders, organized alphabetically. It's not searchable from home. I've spent entire mornings going through those cards. The filing system changed formats twice over the decades, so you have to check multiple drawers and occasionally multiple rooms within that department. For records prior to approximately 1970, you should also check the Ohio Genealogical Digital Library and the FamilySearch catalog. FamilySearch has some microfilm collections digitized and available to view at family history centers, though not all of the Marietta Times runs are included. The call numbers you'll need are typically under the Ohio, Newspapers collection. If you're ordering microfilm through interlibrary loan, expect a 2 to 3 week turnaround depending on the lending library's location.
One practical detail that saves time: the obituary index in the newspaper itself, usually found on the pages just before the death notices. These indexes list the person's name, the date of death, and the page number where the full obituary appears. They're inconsistent in their completeness, especially for the 1980s and earlier. But when they exist, they cut your scanning time dramatically. Without the index, finding a specific obituary in a week's paper can take 20 to 30 minutes of manual page-turning. With it, you can often go straight to the right page. Another thing worth knowing is that The Marietta Times occasionally published second-run obituaries or death announcements in the Sunday edition that didn't appear in the daily paper. If you're searching and can't find a record that someone else confirms existed, check the Sunday paper for that same week. The layout is different, and the online archive sometimes catalogs these under a separate section heading, making them easy to skip if you're only browsing the primary obituary index. There is no single download link for the full archive. Gannett sells access through its pressbox archives platform, but that requires a paid subscription and still has the gaps I mentioned. The cost runs roughly $15 to $20 per month if you go that route, and the coverage is still uneven for anything before 2005. For most researchers, the library route is more practical even though it requires travel or patience with their request system.
Get the Full Details
If you hit a wall with The Marietta Times, the next step is usually cross-referencing with the Parkersburg News & Satellite in West Virginia. Marietta sits right on the Ohio River border, and many residents had ties on both sides. Deaths were sometimes reported in both papers, and the West Virginia outlets have different digitization patterns that may fill in the gaps. One final note on limitations: not every death in the Marietta area was covered by this paper. Rural communities like New Concord, Zanesville, and Marietta's surrounding townships sometimes had their own publication channels. People who died in smaller nursing homes or who had family connections to nearby counties may appear in neighboring publications instead. Assuming the Marietta Times is the definitive source for the area will cause you to miss records. Check the county death indexes at the Muskingum County Health Department as a parallel track. Those records are public and can confirm whether an obituary should exist before you spend hours searching for one that was never published.
