Reading Boston Globe Obituaries Is More Complicated Than You Think
The Boston Globe publishes obituaries daily through its website and print edition, and most people treat it like a simple reference page. It is not. The actual experience of reading those stories requires understanding how the paper sources them, how they are written, and what you are actually looking at when you click through. I have spent years tracking down specific obituaries from the Globe archive, trying to verify dates, get funeral information, or confirm family connections. The process is not straightforward. The website does not make it easy to search by exact date range, and many of the older pieces from before 2015 are behind a paywall with broken links if you come from an external site. Here is how it actually works in practice. You go to theobituaries.bostonglobe.com and use the search bar. You can filter by name, date, and location. But the date filter only goes back about seven years on the free tier. If you need something older, you are dealing with the archive section, which requires a Globe subscription. I ran into this exact problem when I was looking for a specific obituary from 2012. The page existed, but every link to the full text returned a subscription wall. I worked around it by using the Wayback Machine to pull up an archived snapshot of the original article, which had been scraped and stored before the paywall locked it down. That method takes time but it works consistently.
The writing itself follows a fairly strict formula. Most Globe obituaries are written by the family or submitted through a third-party service like Legacy.com, which the Globe partners with. The standard format runs about 300 to 600 words and includes biographical details, surviving family members, service information, and donation requests. The staff does edit many of these, but they do not conduct independent research. That means errors occasionally slip through. I once found an obituary where the birth year was listed as 1925 but the funeral home listed it as 1927 on their own website. The discrepancy was never corrected on the Globe page. This is worth knowing if you are using these articles for genealogical research or legal purposes. Always cross-reference with other sources. One thing people miss is that the Globe also publishes death notices that are separate from the full obituaries. The death notices are shorter, often just a paragraph, and they run in both the print edition and online. They are useful for quick facts but they lack the biographical depth of the full obituary pieces. If you want the detailed life story, you are looking for the longer format with photographs and extended biographical content. Another issue is that the Globe sometimes republishes obituaries from other outlets without attribution. I have seen pieces that were originally published by smaller regional papers, then picked up by the Globe days or weeks later with the byline changed or removed entirely. This happens most often with out-of-town deaths where families choose to place the notice in the Globe because of wider circulation. It is not malicious, but it can be confusing if you are trying to trace the original source of a particular story.
If you are doing serious research, I recommend starting with the free search, then moving to the archive for older pieces, and using alternative databases like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org as backup. Those sites sometimes have images of the original print obituaries that are not available on the Globe website anymore. I have found entire pages of obituaries from the 1990s on microfilm databases that no longer exist in digital form anywhere else. The subscription cost is the main barrier. A Globe digital subscription runs about twenty dollars a month, which is steep if you only need occasional access. Some people use library cards through the Globe's partnership with public libraries to access the archive for free. Check with your local library system first before paying for anything. Reading these obituaries is a legitimate way to understand local history and community memory, but you need to treat them as primary sources with limitations, not as definitive records. The information is usually accurate but never guaranteed. Fact-checking matters, especially for anything you plan to cite or build further research upon.
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