How to actually dig through pressconnects.com obits without losing your mind
Most people go to pressconnects.com looking for a single obituary. They type in a name, find the page, read it, and move on. That works fine when you know exactly who you're looking for. But if you're researching family history, trying to understand a community's patterns, or just genuinely curious about what these pages preserve over time, you quickly run into the fact that the site doesn't give you a proper archive view. There's no clean date-range search. There's no downloadable list. You're left clicking through page after page of listings, hoping the person you want hasn't slipped between the cracks of a poorly indexed result. That's the real project here, once you get past the basic search. The obituaries on pressconnects.com are tied to the Connecticut papers it publishes — primarily The Day in New London and the Connecticut Post brands. They cover Fairfield, New London, and Middlesex counties. That geographic constraint matters more than it should, because it determines whose stories actually make it onto the page. Rural towns get less coverage than the shoreline cities. You'll notice the pattern if you spend enough time in the archives. Here's the practical approach I use when I need to pull information from these obits systematically. First, you work the basic search. Go to pressconnects.com, hit the obituaries section, and use the search bar. But don't rely on it alone. The search engine on this site has known issues with last names that have hyphens or apostrophes. I spent weeks trying to track down a single obituary for someone named O'Leary before realizing the database had dropped the apostrophe entirely. My workaround was simple: search for "OLEARY" with no punctuation, then filter by date range manually. It saved me from giving up on that one.
Once you find an obituary, don't just read the page and leave. The actual value is in what's linked around it. Most obituaries on pressconnects.com link to the funeral home that filed them. That funeral home usually has its own website with additional details — military service records,Survivor lists, club memberships, even scanned photographs that never made it into the newspaper version. I found a complete list of a man's military decorations, including his Purple Heart citation, only by following the link to the funeral home's site. The newspaper obituary mentioned "military service" in two sentences. The funeral home page had the full dossier.
What most people miss about these archives
The pressconnects.com obituary database goes back roughly ten to twelve years, depending on which paper you're looking at. Before that, the content is either buried in the print archives or scattered across other sites. If you're researching someone who died before 2014, your options narrow considerably. The newspaper doesn't maintain a freely accessible digital archive that far back, and GenealogyBank's paywall version of the same content isn't free either. You're left with either paying for a subscription or going to the physical newspaper library, which for these papers means the New London Public Library or the Connecticut State Library in Hartford. Another thing people overlook is the date formatting in the search results. The obituaries are listed by date of publication, not date of death. These can be days or even weeks apart, especially during busy periods like holiday weekends. If you're searching for a death that happened on a specific date, you need to broaden your search window. I once spent an afternoon hunting for an obituary I was certain was published on a Tuesday, only to realize the person had died on the Sunday before and the paper ran it three days later. The search results looked nothing like what I expected because I was filtering by the wrong date column. The obituaries themselves follow a fairly standard template, but the quality varies wildly depending on who wrote them. Some are submitted by professional funeral directors and read like polished biographies. Others are written by grieving family members in the aftermath of a loss and contain raw, unfiltered detail — religious affiliations, veteran status, surviving siblings, even the cause of death in cases where the family chose to be explicit. I've found more useful genealogical information in the rougher, hastily written obituaries than in the polished ones, simply because the family members included details that a professional copywriter would have considered irrelevant or too personal.
Get the Full Details
Edge cases that will trip you up
One specific problem I ran into recently involved a couple who died within days of each other. Their obituaries were published on separate pages, linked from the same funeral home, but the search engine treated them as completely unrelated results. The wife's obituary mentioned she was "preceded in death by her husband of forty-two years," but the husband's obituary, published two days earlier, didn't mention her at all because she had already passed. If you're searching for one and ignore the other, you miss half the family connections. My workaround was to note the date range, pull both obituaries simultaneously, and cross-reference the surviving family members listed in each one. The overlap in names — children, grandchildren, the same funeral home — confirmed they were a couple even though the articles didn't explicitly state it. Nicknames are another recurring issue. The search index sometimes uses the legal name and sometimes the nickname. I've seen the same person appear under both "Robert" and "Bobby" as separate results, when they were obviously the same obituary. The fix is to search for both variations and compare the dates and locations. If they match, merge them in your notes. Don't assume they're different people just because the names look different.
When pressconnects.com obits aren't enough
Let me be clear about the limitations. This site covers a limited geographic area and a limited time range. If you're researching someone who lived outside Connecticut, died before the digital archive started, or whose family didn't order a full obituary, you're out of luck here. The newspaper only publishes obituaries that someone pays for or submits. Many people, especially older men who died alone or whose families were estranged, never get an obituary in any paper. Their deaths appear in the death index but not on this site. Assuming the obituary database is comprehensive is a common mistake that wastes hours of research time. For deeper research, you'll want to supplement pressconnects.com with the Connecticut Death Index, which is available through the state's Department of Public Health. It's a public record, though accessing it requires either a visit to the state archives or a formal request. The index gives you the exact date of death, place of death, and often the parent names of the deceased — information that obituaries frequently omit or soften. Cross-referencing the death index with the pressconnects.com obituaries usually resolves the date discrepancies I mentioned earlier and fills in the gaps where the newspaper coverage was thin. I also recommend checking the Connecticut State Library's genealogy collection if you're serious about this. They have microfilm copies of the pressconnects.com newspapers going back much further than the digital archive. It's not as convenient as browsing a website, but it's free and it covers decades that the online version simply doesn't reach. The obituaries on microfilm are harder to search, true, but they're there if you're willing to spend time at the reading room.
