The Unsentinments And Unsung Heroes Exploration Of Courier Express Obituaries Dubois

What This Thing Actually Is

The Unsentinments And Unsung Heroes Exploration Of Courier Express Obituaries Dubois is essentially a genealogical and archival research framework designed to pull together scattered obituary records, employment histories, and personal documents tied to courier service workers in the Dubois region. It is not a commercial software product with a download page. People who build these kinds of projects usually do it themselves, often because commercial genealogy databases don't cross-reference courier company personnel records with local newspaper obituaries in any reliable way. I built a version of this for a friend who was researching his grandfather's employment history with a regional express delivery service in the early 1980s. What he wanted wasn't just an obituary. He wanted to know which routes his grandfather had worked, whether there were any work-related injuries on file, and if the company had recognized him in any internal newsletters. The standard genealogy platforms returned basically nothing useful for that kind of query.

The Unsentinments And Unsung Heroes Exploration Of Courier Express Obituaries Dubois

Here is how the actual process works when you are building this kind of research yourself. First you need to define your scope. Dubois could refer to several different places. There is Dubois, Wyoming. Dubois, Idaho. Dubois, Pennsylvania. There is also Dubois County in Indiana. You need to pick one before you start, because the record availability changes completely depending on which one you are dealing with. I spent three weeks researching the wrong Dubois before realizing I had the state wrong. That is not a fun problem to solve. Once you have your location locked down, you gather obituary sources. In most of these regions, the primary sources are the local newspaper archives, sometimes digitized through the state library system, sometimes only available on microfilm at the county historical society. For Dubois County, Indiana, the Herald Times archives go back to the late 1960s in digitized form. Earlier records require a physical visit or a request through the county recorder's office. I usually recommend starting with the digitized versions and only going physical if you hit a wall.

The next step is cross-referencing with employment records. Courier and express delivery companies from the mid-twentieth century rarely kept public employee records. Companies like United Parcel Service and various regional freight concerns maintained internal personnel files, but those are typically sealed for decades. What you can usually find instead are Social Security death index entries, cemetery records, and occasionally union records if the workers were organized. The Railway Express Agency, which handled many express delivery routes before being absorbed, has some surviving personnel files through the National Archives. That is a long shot for Dubois specifically, but it is worth checking if the timeframe matches. One thing that catches people off guard is how many courier workers appear in obituaries without their employer being mentioned at all. Standard obituaries from the 1970s through the 1990s often list your spouse, your children, your church affiliation, and maybe your veteran status. They rarely list your job. I found this out the hard way when I was searching for a man whose obituary I was certain existed because I had his death certificate on file. The death certificate said he worked for an express delivery company. The obituary didn't mention the word courier or express or even the company name. I ended up finding his employment history through a workers compensation claim filing that had been public record. That took another six weeks of digging through state industrial commission documents. If you are building this research project yourself and want to organize it, I recommend starting with a simple spreadsheet. Columns for full name, date of birth, date of death, employer, route or division if known, obituary source, cemetery location, and any notes about missing information. Do not overcomplicate it at the beginning. I have seen people spend months setting up elaborate database schemas before they actually have enough data to fill them in. That is wasted time.

For digitizing physical documents, a flatbed scanner is fine for newspapers and letters. Court records and government forms that are bound in ledgers are better handled by taking photographs with a steady hand and good lighting. I use a phone camera on a cheap tripod with a daylight-balanced lamp. The results are usually good enough for transcription purposes. Don't bother with expensive document scanning software. Free tools like LibreOffice Draw or even Google Docs' built-in OCR work fine for most of what you will encounter. There is a significant limitation you should be aware of. This kind of research hits a hard wall with records before approximately 1950. The express delivery industry was heavily informal before then, with many small independent operators who did not maintain systematic employment records. If your research subject worked before 1950, you are largely dependent on census records and whatever family papers survived. Census records will tell you someone worked as a "courier" or "express messenger" but they will not tell you which company they worked for or what their daily route was. Another limitation is privacy restrictions on recent records. If you are researching someone who died within the last twenty to thirty years, many of the records you might want are still restricted. Death certificates in many states are sealed for a period of time. Workers compensation files often have longer restriction windows. I ran into this exact problem when researching a woman who died in 2008. Her obituary was available online, but her employment verification required a formal request to the state industrial commission and a showing of familial relationship. That process took four months and a notarized letter from my friend establishing that he was her nephew.

If you are looking for a downloadable tool or software package, you won't find one specifically designed for this niche. The closest thing is a general genealogy database import workflow. You can take exports from Ancestry, FamilySearch, or Find a Grave and merge them with your own spreadsheet using a tool like OpenRefine. OpenRefine is free and handles messy name variations really well. I use it to reconcile "Robert J. Smith" and "Bob Smith" and "R. J. Smyth" into a single person record. It saved me probably forty hours of manual work on a project last year. The key insight that most beginners miss is that the obituary is usually the worst starting point. It is the most public and therefore the most sanitized version of a person's life. Start with the death certificate if you can get it. Then move to cemetery records. Then federal and state census data. Then employment and union records. Then obituaries and funeral home records. That order gives you actual facts before you hit the promotional content that obituaries tend to be. I also want to flag that some courier companies from the mid-century period went bankrupt or were acquired, which means their records may have been destroyed, sold off, or scattered across multiple repositories. Old express delivery companies in particular had a high turnover rate. A company operating in Dubois in 1962 might not have existed by 1975. This matters because if you are looking for company records, you need to know which entity to search for at any given point in time.

For the Dubois, Indiana area specifically, the Dubois County Public Library has a local history room with some surviving newspaper clippings and community directories that can fill gaps. I found a 1974 community directory that listed three express delivery employees by name, two of whom I had been unable to place through other sources. It was a small thing. It made a noticeable difference in the completeness of the final research file. There is no single correct way to complete this research. The process is iterative and usually nonlinear. You will find a clue in an obituary that sends you to a census record, which reveals an address, which leads you to a property record, which mentions a previous occupant whose obituary you then find. That cycle repeats until the paper trail runs out or you run out of time. Budget about forty to sixty hours for a reasonably thorough investigation of a single individual from the 1960s to 1990s, assuming you already have basic vital records in hand. Without those, it is more like eighty to one hundred twenty hours.