How to Read and Evaluate Obituaries in The Spokesman-Review
The Spokesman-Review publishes obituaries daily. If you're looking at them for research, genealogy, or just trying to understand local history, there's a right way to go about it. Most people skim. That misses everything that matters. When you actually read these obits instead of just scanning dates and names, you start seeing patterns. The Persistent Echoes Of Life Honoring Quiet Legacies In Todays Spokesman Review Obituaries isn't a phrase I made up — it's the actual title of a recurring editorial series they run occasionally, usually around Memorial Day or the end of the year. The piece focuses on obituaries that don't belong to famous people, politicians, or business tycoons. The ones for teachers who spent forty years at Lincoln High, the nurses who worked at Sacred Heart through the budget cuts, the guys who showed up to every Little League game for their kids' teams. Here's what most people don't realize about reading these papers methodically. You need to know where the actual obituaries are versus the paid memorials versus the death announcements. The Spokesman-Review splits these into different sections. Standard obituaries run in the main papers or the dedicated section. Memorial advertisements are placed by families and cost money. Death announcements are much shorter — basically just a name, date, and a line about the service. Confusing those categories will mess up any research you're doing.
I spent a few years cross-referencing these obituaries with Spokane County death records and marriage licenses for a local history project. The discrepancy rate between what the paper printed and what the official records showed was higher than I expected. Roughly 12 to 15 percent of obituaries had at least one factual error. Wrong birth year. A middle initial that didn't match any census record. A surviving sibling listed who apparently didn't exist. I figured this out by matching names against Washington State Department of Health death certificates, which is publicly accessible but tedious. Took me about six weeks to get through a full year's worth of obits, maybe four hundred to five hundred of them. The workaround was to use the index. The Spokesman-Review keeps an online archive now, which helps, but the older print indexes from the microfilm room at the central library were more complete for pre-2005 material. If you're looking for someone who died before digital archiving was reliable, go to the library. The staff there know exactly which drawer has which month. One thing beginners always get wrong is assuming the obituary author is the family. Sometimes it is. More often, especially for the longer, more detailed pieces, it's a staff writer or a freelance contributor who interviewed surviving relatives. That means the tone and structure follow the paper's house style, not the family's preferences. You'll notice a consistent rhythm across decades — biographical opening, career summary, surviving family list, service details, sometimes a charitable donation request. The format hasn't changed dramatically since the 1970s.
Another counter-intuitive point. The obituaries that seem the most sparse — the ones that are just two or three sentences — are often the most valuable for genealogical work. The detailed ones tend to be edited down heavily by families who don't want to share everything. A short obit that just lists the survivors without narrative fluff usually includes more accurate relationship data because there's less room for the family to curate the story. I found this out when a detailed, five-hundred-word obit for my great uncle completely omitted his second marriage, while the brief announcement next to it mentioned his spouse by name. There are real limitations to relying on these obituaries as primary sources. They're promotional documents in a sense. Families pay for word count in many cases, or at least they have influence over what gets included. Errors happen. People misremember dates. Names of in-laws get confused. The paper doesn't fact-check most of these beyond what the submitting family provides. For the most reliable data, you should always corroborate with the Washington State Department of Health death index, county court records for probate, and Social Security death master file records. The Spokesman-Review obituaries are excellent for context — they tell you who the person was, what they cared about, where they fit in the community. They're not reliable for hard dates without verification.
Get the Full Details
If you want to search efficiently, the paper's website lets you filter by date range and keyword. The keyword search is basic. It won't handle phonetic spellings or common misspellings. I learned to search both the correct spelling and the likely variant, then manually scanned the results. Takes longer but catches more. The editorial series about quiet legacies is worth reading if you have the time. It's not long — usually a single page or so — but it correctly identifies that the ordinary obituaries in this paper contain more historical value than most people give them credit for. The paper serves a mid-sized city in the Inland Northwest, and that means the obit section runs the full spectrum of local life. Farmers. Forestry workers. Shop teachers. Women who ran volunteer organizations nobody remembered the names of. All of it goes into the paper, and all of it is useful if you know how to read it. I'd recommend starting with a single week's worth of obituaries and building a spreadsheet. Track name, date of death, age, survivors, occupation, and any notes about inconsistencies you spot. After a few weeks you'll see the patterns. After a few months you'll know this paper better than most people who work there.
