Why Most People Skip the Obituary Section And What They Miss

Most people flip past the back pages looking for sports scores or crossword answers. The obituary section sits there at fifty or a hundred words per notice, sometimes longer for community staples, and nobody really reads it anymore. That is a mistake if you care about local history or genealogy, because these notices contain information that does not exist anywhere else.

The Unsung Heroes Of The Post Tribune Exploring The Fascinating World Of Obituaries

The Post Tribune in Evanston and Chicago has been publishing obituaries since the late nineteenth century. The modern versions are shorter than they used to be, but the core data structure has stayed remarkably consistent across decades. Name, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and occasionally a line or two about where someone worked or which organization they belonged to. That last part is what separates a useful record from a filler piece. I spent about three years building a family history project around my grandmother's side of the family, and the obituaries were where I found the gaps that census records left open. Census data stops at 1950 for public access. Birth and death certificates require proof of kinship in most counties. Obituaries just ask you to show up and look.

How To Actually Search Effectively

Start with the newspaper's own archive if it has one. The Post Tribune moved its archives behind a subscription wall through the Chicago Tribune's system, which means you can search by name, date range, and keyword within the obituary body. If you are researching someone born before 1940, you will find more in the microfilm copies at the Evanston Public Library than you will online. The digital scan quality drops off significantly for anything before 1998. When I hit a dead end searching for my great-uncle Harold, who died in 1973, the online database returned nothing. The index had a misspelling of his last name — his family consistently spelled it with one 't' in the official records but two 't's on the tombstone. The physical microfilm at the library was indexed by handwritten card, and the catalog card had the single-'t' version. I found his obituary in about ten minutes once I was looking at the actual film. That kind of discrepancy happens far more often than you would expect. A practical workaround for cases like that is to search for the person's spouse or siblings instead. Obituaries routinely list surviving family members, so if you can find a sibling's notice first, the target name usually appears in the survivors list. I used this method to trace three branches of my grandmother's family that the direct searches never uncovered.

What To Extract And In What Order

Grab the basic data points first. Full name including any middle names or nicknames used in print. Date and place of death. Name and location of the funeral home. Names and relationships of surviving family members. Names of predeceased relatives. Church or synagogue if mentioned. Military service details if applicable. Employer or occupation if stated. After that, look for the details that people routinely overlook. The order of service mentions often include the officiating clergy name, which can point you toward religious records. Mentions of specific organizations — a Rotary club, a union local, a veterans group — give you starting points for further research. Sometimes the obituary will reference a particular workplace, and that single detail can lead to personnel files or company histories that are otherwise inaccessible. One thing that takes people by surprise is how many obituaries include the mother's maiden name in the surviving family list. It is buried in a sentence like "survived by his wife, Margaret; his children, David and Susan; and his mother, Eleanor Vance," and you might scroll right past it. But "Eleanor Vance" gives you the maternal surname without having to dig through marriage records first.

Common Problems And What They Mean

Not every death gets an obituary. People who die alone, without family members who can afford or want to pay for a notice, often go unmentioned. The Post Tribune charged by the line or by the word for decades, and a standard obituary could run forty to eighty dollars depending on length. Some families chose a death notice instead, which was cheaper and just listed the bare facts. Others chose nothing at all. You will also run into abbreviations that vary by era. "Survived by her husband John" does not necessarily mean he was alive when the notice went to print — it could mean he predeceased her and the family still listed him in the traditional format. I spent about two weeks trying to track down a living spouse who turned out to have died five years earlier based on a separate obituary in a different paper. The wording was standard, not misleading, but it is easy to misread if you assume every name listed is currently living. Another issue is the delay between death and publication. Some families wanted the notice in the paper for the funeral on a specific day, which meant submitting it two or three days before the actual death occurred. This is most common in the mid-twentieth century when people arranged everything in advance. If the date in the obituary does not match the death certificate, check the submission date rather than assuming the records are wrong.

Digital Access Options

The Chicago Tribune's archive subscription covers Post Tribune content and runs about twenty-five dollars a month if you go that route. Ancestry.com has some Chicago-area newspaper collections, but the coverage is incomplete and the search functionality is weaker than the publisher's own system. If you only need a handful of notices, the subscription might be worth it for a month and then canceled. If you are doing serious research, the microfilm route at the Evanston Public Library is free and often more thorough for pre-1998 material. Fold3 and other genealogy platforms occasionally scrape obituary databases, but the indexing quality is inconsistent. A name search might pull results from unrelated newspapers that happened to mention the same name. Cross-reference everything you find through those services back to the original publication before you treat it as fact.

What These Notices Can And Cannot Tell You

Obituaries are reliable for the data the family chose to provide. They are not reliable for completeness. Families sometimes omitted reasons for death, previous marriages, children from prior relationships, or estrangements. A standard obituary from the 1960s might list only the nuclear family and ignore siblings entirely. That silence does not mean those people did not exist. The information density improves considerably after about 1985 when newspapers started running longer, more personalized obituaries. Before that, the format was rigid and the content was minimal. If your research focus is pre-1970, you will need to supplement obituaries with city directory searches, cemetery records, and church registers to fill in what the notices leave out. There is no single perfect system for pulling this together. The best approach is to start with the obituary, extract everything it offers, and then move outward to the records it references. Most of the useful connections are one or two steps away from what is printed in those few paragraphs.