Searching The Morning Call Obituaries For Allentown, PA
The Morning Call has been publishing obituaries in Allentown for over a century. If you are looking for someone who lived here, their death notice or full obituary is likely archived on their website or in print. I have spent more years than I care to count digging through these records for family genealogy projects and legal research. It is not always straightforward. Most people go straight to the Morning Call website and search the obituary section. That works for recent deaths, usually back to around 2014 or 2015 when they started putting everything online. Anything older than that requires a different approach, and this is where a lot of people get stuck. I had a client last year trying to find the obituary for his great aunt who died in 1998. He spent about forty-five minutes searching the current website before reaching out. The obit was there in the archives, but it had been scanned and the OCR misread part of her name because of faded ink from the original printing. The search term he used came up with zero results. I told him to try her maiden name instead, since the obit referenced both her married and maiden names. That pulled it up immediately. Even now, old scans can be a problem if you are relying entirely on text search.
For records going back further than the digital archive, you have two real options. One is contacting the Allentown Library's local history and genealogy department. They have microfilm going back decades, sometimes centuries depending on the era. The other is searching Ancestry or FamilySearch, which have digitized portions of Morning Call obituaries. Those indexes are not complete, but they cover gaps that neither the library nor the newspaper's own site can fill. What actually works in practice: If the death happened within the last ten years, go to the Morning Call website directly. Use the obituary search tool and try variations of the name. You will usually find it within five minutes. Factor in that some families submit extended life stories rather than standard death notices, so the title might not include the word "obituary." Search by date range as well as by name to cast a wider net.
For anything older than ten years, start with the library microfilm or the paid genealogy databases. The library is free and the staff there know how to navigate the collection. I recommend going in person if you can, because scanning a microfilm page yourself is faster than asking a librarian to do it for you. Most locations allow you to take your own photos of the film. There are limitations you should know about. Not every person who died in Allentown had an obituary in The Morning Call. People who lived in neighboring townships like Whitehall or Northampton sometimes had their notices run in the Morning Call if they had family ties, but often they ran in competing papers like the Express-Times or the Eagle Tribune. If you are only searching one source, you will miss people. I have seen this come up repeatedly when families assume a single paper covered every local death. Another issue is that obituary content varies wildly depending on who wrote it. Some were penned by professional funeral home writers and read like polished resumes. Others were typed up by a grieving relative in a hurry and contain factual errors, wrong dates, or misspelled names. Cross-referencing with cemetery records or Social Security death indexes is worth the extra effort if you are doing this for any serious purpose like legal documentation or family history research.
Get the Full Details
The Morning Call does offer a printed edition archive that includes older obituaries in a more reliable format than some of the earlier web scans. Subscribers can access it, but non-subscribers usually cannot without purchasing individual article downloads or visiting a physical library. Budget between fifteen and thirty minutes per search depending on how far back you need to go and how common the surname is in the area. If you hit a dead end and still cannot locate a record, the Allegheny County Clerk of Orphans Court maintains death records that predate the newspaper coverage. It is a separate system entirely and requires a formal request, but it is the next logical step when the obituary trail goes cold.
