Getting Things Done With The Morning Call's Obituary Section
If you are trying to find an obituary from The Morning Call for someone who lived in Lehigh County, or if you need to place one yourself, the process is straightforward but there are enough small frustrations that knowing the details ahead of time saves a real headache. The Morning Call has been publishing local obituaries for over a century, and they moved their content online a while back. That means the old paper copies still exist somewhere in microfilm or archived PDFs, but most people today are working with the digital version. I spent years helping families navigate this after my own grandmother died, and the first thing you learn is that grief does not make it easier to figure out web forms. Here is what you actually need to know.
The Morning Call Obits Lehigh County Honoring Lives Preserving Community Memory
The obituary section of The Morning Call covers Allentown, Easton, Bethlehem, and the surrounding Lehigh Valley communities. When someone passes away, a family or funeral home submits an obituary, and The Morning Call publishes it both in print and online. The online version stays permanently accessible, which is the main reason this archive matters. Unlike a printed paper that gets recycled after a few weeks, these online obituaries remain searchable years later. The site organizes obituaries by date, with the most recent ones appearing first. You can also search by name, which is useful if you know exactly who you are looking for. If you only have partial information, the search tends to get messy fast. You will end up scrolling through dozens of results that match only a first name or a rough date range. This is a known frustration that nobody at the newspaper seems to have solved yet. When I tried to track down an obituary for a great-uncle who died in 2008, the online search gave me three different results for people with the same last name. The actual obituary was buried under a similarly named living person who happened to share his surname. I eventually found it by browsing the archives month by month, which took about forty minutes. A direct name search would have been faster if the database were cleaner. The workaround is to narrow your search to a specific funeral home. Most families route their submissions through a local funeral director, and searching by funeral home name on the archive page usually cuts through the noise significantly.
How to Place an Obituary
Placing an obituary requires working through the submission process on The Morning Call's website or contacting their advertising department directly. The standard rate runs somewhere between two hundred and four hundred dollars depending on length and whether you include a photograph. Photo placement adds another fee, usually around fifty to seventy-five dollars on top of the base price. A short obituary of one hundred to one hundred and fifty words typically costs less than a longer one that runs three or four hundred words. You will need a few things ready before you start the submission. The full name of the deceased, including any middle names or suffixes. Date of birth and date of death. A short biographical paragraph. Information about surviving family members. Details about the service or visitation. And a photograph if you want one. Some families write the initial draft themselves, while others hand the whole thing off to the funeral director, who usually knows the format and submission process already. One thing that catches people off guard is the verification step. The Morning Call may call the funeral home or the family to confirm details before publishing. This is actually a good thing because it prevents errors, but it also means your obituary might not go live on the same day you submit it. Expect a turnaround of one to three business days unless you are working with an urgent same-day request, which is possible for an additional rush fee.
Get the Full Details
What the Archive Actually Contains
The Morning Call obituary archive goes back decades. I have used it myself to find records from the early nineties without much trouble. The older entries are sometimes scanned images of the original print versions, and occasionally the text quality is rough if the original typeset was faded or damaged. Newer obituaries are fully searchable text, which makes a meaningful difference when you are looking for a specific detail like a middle school name or a particular employer. The archive includes both the current obituary and the associated guest book, where people leave messages of condolence. Those guest book entries can sometimes contain more personal information than the obituary itself, including memories from friends, co-workers, and extended family who might not be listed in the formal notice. I found a note from a former coworker that mentioned a volunteer project my grandfather had started, information that never appeared in the obituary text. That kind of detail is genuinely useful for family historians, and it is something people rarely factor in when they first look at an obituary archive.
Common Problems and What to Do About Them
The website can be slow during peak hours, particularly in the evening when multiple families are placing obituaries at the same time. If you are trying to submit one and the page freezes, do not keep refreshing endlessly. Wait ten minutes and try again, or just call the advertising desk directly and do it over the phone. It is slower, but it avoids the broken form session entirely. Another issue is spelling variations in last names. If the obituary was entered with a misspelling, it will not show up in a correctly spelled search. I once spent twenty minutes looking for an obituary under the spelling "Schneider" before realizing the newspaper had entered it as "Schneier" due to a phone mishearing during the submission process. The solution here is to search both the correct spelling and likely phonetic variations, or to use the guest book feature, which sometimes includes the correct spelling in reader comments. There is also a real limitation you should understand. The Morning Call does not index every single death in Lehigh County. Families who chose cremation without a funeral home, or those who placed obituaries in other publications like the Express-Times or the Daily Voice, will not appear in this archive. If you cannot find someone here, it does not necessarily mean they died without an obituary. It may mean the family used a different outlet. Checking multiple sources is worth the extra effort, though it adds time to the research process.
Why This Matters Beyond the Practical Details
Obituaries are one of the most underappreciated primary sources for local history. Census records give you names and addresses. Birth and death certificates give you dates. But an obituary tells you who the person actually was in the context of their community, what they worked at, which churches and organizations they belonged to, and how they were remembered by the people around them. For genealogists, local historians, and families trying to piece together a legacy, these records fill gaps that official documents simply do not address. The Morning Call has preserved enough of this material over enough decades that it represents one of the more complete regional obituary collections in the state. That completeness is not accidental. It comes from a newspaper that built its readership on being the local paper of record for Lehigh County. The tradeoff is that the archive is not freely available in every format, and some older entries are behind a subscription wall if you want to access them without creating an account. This is not unique to The Morning Call. Most regional newspapers operate this way now, and it reflects the broader economic reality of print media rather than any specific policy choice by the paper itself.
Quick Reference
Access the obituary archive through theobituaries.com, which hosts The Morning Call's content. Search by name, date, or funeral home. Budget roughly two hundred to four hundred dollars for a standard obituary plus additional fees for photos and rush processing. Expect the piece to publish within one to three business days after submission. Use funeral home searches to cut through ambiguous name results. Check alternate publications if a search here comes up empty. Guest book entries often contain more personal detail than the obituary text itself. If you are doing research for a family history project or looking for a specific person's notice, starting with a broad name search and then narrowing by funeral home or approximate date is the approach that actually works. The system has quirks, but it is functional once you know which buttons to press and where the common pitfalls hide.
