How to Find Obituaries in The Hawkeye Digital Archive
I've spent more time than I care to admit digging through old Burlington papers for family history, and the Hawkeye archives are not straightforward. The site shifts between multiple platforms depending on which era you're looking at, and the search function treats every operator like a suggestion rather than a command. If you're trying to find a specific obituary, start at thehawekeyeonline.com and look for the obituaries section. From there you can filter by date range. But here's what nobody tells you: if the person died before 2015 or so, you might get sent to a completely different system called NewsBank. That one requires a separate login, sometimes through your local library card, sometimes through a subscription.
The Hawkeye Obituaries Burlington Iowa A Digital Archive Of Memory And Community
The archive itself is a solid resource for south-central Iowa genealogy. Burlington sits in Des Moines County, and the Hawkeye has been publishing since 1851. The obituaries go back much further than most people realize — I found records from the 1920s that had details not preserved anywhere else, including a miner who worked the nearby coal seams and a midwife who delivered babies during the 1918 flu pandemic. What works in practice is simpler than the interface suggests. Use the advanced search with exact phrase matching on the full name. "John Smith" in quotes finds significantly fewer results than just John Smith without quotes. Add the year of death in the date field. If you get zero results, try searching for just the surname — sometimes the first name was abbreviated or mistranscribed in the digitization process.
My Experience With the Archive
Last year I was tracking down a great-uncle who died in 1963. The online archive showed the obituary but clipped the middle section. The NewsBank database had the full text, but accessing it required me to call the Des Moines County Public Library and ask for their NewsBank card. They gave me one that worked for a year. Without it, I would have had to drive to Burlington and search the microfilm physically. The workaround for missing pages is to check the print edition. The Hawkeye has a reading room downtown with complete bound volumes going back to the late 1800s. If the online version cut off part of an obituary, the paper original almost always has the full text. I spent three afternoons there going through 1963 microfilm and recovered three obituaries that weren't digitized yet because they were considered too recent.
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Common Problems and Workarounds
The search index occasionally double-counts the same obituary under slightly different date stamps. I ran into this when my grandmother's funeral program said she died on a Tuesday, but the archive listed two entries — one for Sunday and one for Wednesday. The actual obituary appeared under the Sunday date, which doesn't match her death certificate. The paper microfilm confirmed she died Tuesday evening and the funeral was Sunday morning, meaning the paper ran the obituary before she actually passed, likely because the obituary was submitted in advance. Another issue is misspelled names. The Hawkeye uses OCR technology for older articles, and "Schmidt" becomes "Schnidt" or "Smith" depending on how faded the original print was. I found my great-grandfather's obituary by searching for his middle name "August" combined with his wife's maiden name. Searching for his actual name yielded nothing because the OCR misread the "g" as a "q" and created "Auqust." Image quality varies dramatically across the archive. Obituaries from the 1970s and earlier are often grainy, with halftone printing that degrades badly during digitization. The newer ones from the 2000s are crisp black and white scans. Text from the 1950s onward is usually searchable, but pre-1950 obituaries often require manual browsing through the scan images rather than keyword search.
What the Archive Misses
Not every obituary gets digitized. The Hawkeye has been focusing on content from 1990 onward for their online platform. Older material exists on microfilm but isn't always available through the subscription databases. Rural Burlington areas outside the Des Moines County line sometimes have overlapping coverage from the Quad City Times or even the Des Moines Register, but those aren't linked from the Hawkeye site. The archive also doesn't include funeral home notices that ran in other Burlington papers like the Burlington Gazette, which folded in 2008. If someone had a long obituary in the Gazette but only a brief mention in the Hawkeye, you'd get incomplete information by searching only the Hawkeye. I learned this when researching a Civil War veteran whose full pension record appeared in the Gazette but was summarized to three paragraphs in the Hawkeye.
Practical Search Tips
Use the date range as narrowly as possible. Broad searches across entire decades return hundreds of results, most of which aren't relevant. A six-month window typically cuts the result set down to something manageable. If you know the exact date, search that single day plus two days on either side to account for publication delays. Check the "Recently Added" or "Latest Obituaries" section if you're looking for someone who died within the last few years. The Hawkeye publishes new obituaries daily, and they often appear on the homepage before they show up in search results. The archive updates in batches, sometimes with a 24-to-48-hour delay between publication and digital availability. If you need help navigating the archive, the Hawkeye newsroom lists a contact email for archive questions. They don't do deep research for you, but they can confirm whether a specific date range has been digitized and point you toward the right platform. I've received responses within a business day when I hit a dead end with NewsBank access.
Alternatives When the Archive Fails
Ancestry.com has a subscription-based Iowa obituary collection that includes some Hawkeye content, but it duplicates only a fraction of what the direct archive holds. Find a Grave has transcriptions of headstone inscriptions from Burlington cemeteries, but those lack the biographical detail that newspaper obituaries provide. The Des Moines County Historical Society maintains its own paper file of clippings that predates the digital archive by decades. For obituaries before 1900, the Iowa Digital Library sometimes has scanned local newspapers that the Hawkeye site hasn't indexed yet. It's not reliable for every era, but it caught a 1887 obituary I couldn't find anywhere else — a young woman who died in childbirth, listed only by her husband's surname in the archive index but fully identified in the original scan. The most consistent approach is to use the Hawkeye archive as your primary source and fall back to microfilm at the library when the online version is incomplete. Most researchers find that combination covers everything they need for Burlington-area genealogy, provided they're willing to spend time on both platforms rather than expecting a single search to solve the problem.
