Working With The Colorado Springs Gazette Obituary Archive
I've spent years pulling obituaries from regional newspaper archives for family history research and genealogy projects. The Colorado Springs Gazette has one of the more useful collections in the state, but it's not straightforward to navigate if you don't know the quirks. Most people hit a wall within ten minutes and give up, which is unfortunate because the material there is solid for the right use case. Here's how it actually works. The archive lives at gazette.com and functions through their main newspaper site. You can search obituaries by name, date range, and keyword. The search interface is clunky but functional. Results span back roughly to 1997 for digital coverage, though some earlier records exist as microfilm only. Print-era obituaries before the digitization cutoff are accessible through the Pikes Peak Regional Library District if you're willing to make a trip or request a scan. The search syntax follows standard boolean rules. If you want to be specific, put the last name in quotes and combine with a first initial. Searching "Smith" J. 1990..2000 narrows things down more than a loose full-name match that pulls every Smith who ever died within your date window. I use that trick constantly.
One thing most people miss: the archive doesn't always index the full obituary text reliably. I learned this the hard way when researching a great-uncle who served in Vietnam. I searched his military service keywords and got zero results, even though I knew he was in the paper. The indexer had pulled the death notice portion but missed the biographical summary where his service was mentioned. I found it by pulling the print edition PDF directly from that week instead of relying on the text search. The actual scanned page had everything, just unindexed beneath the searchable metadata.
What You Actually Get From These Records
A standard Gazette obituary from the early 2000s onward includes the deceased's full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and a brief biographical sketch. Earlier obituaries are thinner. A 1998 record might be three paragraphs and mention a spouse and two children. A 2015 record could run a full column with workplace, church affiliation, and a dozen surviving relatives listed by name. The real value isn't just the death information. It's the genealogical network. Siblings, cousins, in-laws, and friends named in the surviving-family section create cross-references you can follow into other obituaries and records. I once traced an immigrant family's arrival path through Colorado by connecting three separate obituaries across fifteen years. The first mentioned a brother who died in 1982, the second in 1994 listed the same brother's daughter, and the third in 2008 named a niece who'd moved to Denver. Each obituary filled a gap the others couldn't reach alone.
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Pitfalls And Where The Archive Falls Short
The biggest limitation is coverage gaps. The Gazette doesn't publish every obituary for Colorado Springs. Smaller deaths, cremations without service, and families who use funeral homes outside the area often don't appear in print or digital form. If someone died in a nearby town and the family chose a florissant or evans funeral home, the Gazette might never see the submission. You need to check the Denver Post archive and Pueblo Chieftain records for those gaps, especially for border counties. Name variations are another problem. The index treats "Roberts" and "Robert's" as different strings. I found an obituary for a woman who went by "Betty" professionally but was listed as "Elizabeth" in the archive. The search came back empty until I pulled the actual newspaper page from that date and scanned it manually. Running both versions separately cuts your miss rate roughly in half, though it doubles your search time. The digital archive also has a paywall issue. Basic obituary listings are free to view. Full article access with original layout and adjacent editorial content requires a subscription. The subscription isn't terrible — maybe eight to twelve dollars a month — but if you're only pulling three or four records, it's not worth it. In those cases, the Pikes Peak library route is faster. They have print archives on microfilm and can run interlibrary loan requests for copies.
Practical Workflow That Actually Works
Start broad, then narrow. Search the last name alone with no date filter first to see how many hits come up. If you get fewer than fifty results, you're in good shape. If you get several hundred, add a first initial or approximate year range. Pull the top relevant results and scan the snippet preview before clicking through. The snippet usually contains enough to confirm a match without burning a search pass. Save or screenshot each relevant record immediately. The archive session times out, and I've lost three records to session expiration because I was reading ahead too fast. Browser bookmarks don't stick either — the links expire after a certain period. I keep a running spreadsheet with the person's name, death date, URL, and any family members mentioned. Takes about thirty seconds per record and saves you from reconstructing it later. When you find a promising match, pull the surrounding obituaries from the same week. Funeral homes often submit multiple notices on the same day, and neighbors or fellow service members sometimes appear in adjacent pieces. I found a veteran's entire squadron roster by reading the three obituaries published on the same page as his.
Alternatives When The Gazette Doesn't Have It
If the archive returns nothing useful, the next stop is Ancestry.com's Colorado obituary collection. It aggregates records from multiple papers including the Gazette but indexes differently, so you may find matches that the direct site search misses. The Colorado State Archives in Denver holds older newspapers on microfilm that predate the digital cutoff. Research visits usually require an appointment and a valid library card, but they're open to the public. Local historical societies are also worth contacting. The El Paso County Genealogical Society maintains its own obituary index that overlaps with but extends beyond the Gazette. They don't charge for basic lookups, and their volunteers know the geography of local coverage well enough to tell you whether a death in a specific neighborhood would likely have appeared in the Gazette or elsewhere. The archive is useful but imperfect. Treat it as one source among several rather than the final word, and you'll get much more out of it than people who expect it to solve the whole problem on its own.
