Reading Obituaries in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: What Actually Matters
Obituaries in the Cleveland Plain Dealer have changed significantly over the past decade. The format, the way they get published, and what you can actually do with them is different from what most people remember. I deal with this stuff regularly—researching family histories, tracking down old notices, helping people navigate what’s still available and what’s already gone. That phrase you see floating around is mostly marketing copy from a obituary writing service or a tribute platform that partners with the paper. It doesn’t mean much technically. The actual obituaries themselves are straightforward biographical notices with a few standard sections: surviving family, service information, and often a short personal detail or two that makes the person real instead of just a list of relatives. Here’s what most people don’t realize when they go looking for these. The Cleveland Plain Dealer moved its obituary section online several years ago. The print version still exists but it’s severely condensed now. If you’re trying to find an obituary from more than five or six years back, the print archives are basically useless unless you have physical access to the microfilm at the Western Reserve Historical Society or a library that subscribes to the archived paper.
I ran into a specific problem last year where someone was trying to locate an obituary for their great-uncle who died in 2011. They had the name, the approximate date, and nothing else. The online search tool on cleveland.com only goes back so far and the indexing on older entries is inconsistent. Sometimes the full text is there. Sometimes it’s just a thumbnail image that loads terribly slow or not at all on mobile. Here’s what actually worked for me: I bypassed the regular search and went directly to the newspaper’s archival request system, which routes to the library’s reference desk. They pulled the microfilm copy and I photographed the relevant page. That process took about three business days. The online search would have kept spinning forever. Another thing people miss. The obituaries themselves often contain genealogical gold if you know where to look. Beyond the obvious survivor lists, check the funeral home attribution at the bottom. That tells you which funeral home handled arrangements, and those businesses usually maintain their own records. I’ve had better luck tracking down birth dates and parents’ names by calling the funeral home listed in the obituary than by digging through census records. Many of them will confirm basic facts if you have the full name and approximate death date. The Plain Dealer does charge for obituary placement. That’s worth knowing if you’re trying to understand why some people appear in the paper and others don’t. A standard obituary runs several hundred dollars depending on length and whether it includes a photo. This means the obituaries you see are a self-selected sample—they skew toward people whose families could afford to pay for them. There were absolutely people who died in Cuyahoga County who never appeared in the Plain Dealer because their families couldn’t or didn’t want to place a notice. If you’re doing historical research and your ancestor is missing from the paper, that doesn’t necessarily mean something strange happened. It might just mean money was tight.
For anyone actively dealing with this right now, here’s the practical path. Go to cleveland.com/obituaries. Use the search function with as much detail as you have. If you hit a dead end, try searching by funeral home name instead of by person. Sometimes that surfaces results the name search misses. If you need something older, contact the Cleveland Public Library’s Local History and Genealogy Department. They have the complete run and their staff knows how to navigate the older digitized issues that aren’t properly indexed. One more thing that isn’t obvious. The Plain Dealer obituaries occasionally publish corrections or updates if family members submit additional information after the initial notice. I found this out the hard way when researching a family line where two different dates for the same person appeared in two different issues. The later issue had an editorial note explaining the discrepancy. Always check if there was a follow-up if something in an obituary looks wrong. The format of these notices has shifted too. Modern obituaries tend to be longer and more personal than they used to be. Twenty years ago you’d get three paragraphs and a list of survivors. Now you’ll often get a full narrative biography, sometimes written by the family themselves before submission. That’s useful but it also means the content reflects whatever the surviving family chooses to include or omit. Verify important facts against other sources whenever possible.
Get the Full Details
If you’re trying to access old issues that predate the online archive, the Western Reserve Historical Society on East 9th Street has the complete print collection on microfilm. They have reading equipment and staff who can help you locate specific dates. It’s free to use the collection with a reader card. You’ll need to spend a couple hours going through the reels if you don’t already know the exact date, but it’s reliable and nothing competes with it for completeness. I’ve also noticed that some people try to scrape or bulk-download obituaries for research projects. The Plain Dealer’s website doesn’t actively block this at small scale but their terms of service prohibit it and they do enforce it if you generate enough traffic to notice. For legitimate genealogical research, just request copies through the proper channels. It takes longer but it doesn’t put you at risk of having your access blocked entirely. The bottom line is that the Cleveland Plain Dealer obituaries are still a valuable resource but they require more effort to use properly than they used to. The easy era of browsing the Sunday paper is over. The information is still there, you just have to know where to look and what to do when the obvious path doesn’t work.
