Researching The Gary Post Tribune Obituaries For Family History Work
Most people I talk to when they find out what I do for genealogy projects look mildly sympathetic. They've spent maybe ten minutes on Ancestry or FamilySearch and think they understand archival research. There's a gap between what those platforms show and what's actually useful, especially with smaller regional papers like the Gary Post Tribune. I've been pulling obituaries from this source for local families in Lake County for several years now. The process is straightforward once you know where the actual material lives and where it doesn't. The Gary Post Tribune was a daily newspaper serving Gary, Indiana from roughly 1910 to the late 1990s when it merged into other Hearst publications. For obituary research, the window that matters most is 1925 through 1998. Before that, obits were sporadic. After that, you're dealing with the Times-Gazette or Chicago Tribune indexes instead. The physical microfilm runs are held at the Gary Public Library Local History Department and also at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. Some collections made it to microfilm through GenealogyBank, but the coverage there is incomplete and you'll miss issues from certain years. The real problem nobody warns you about is that obituary placement was not consistent across demographics in this paper. If you're researching Black families in Gary, you'll notice a sharp drop-off in obituary coverage from about 1940 to 1965 compared to white families in the same area. That's not a research error. It reflected the paper's editorial decisions at the time. Many Black families published notices through the Calumet News or placed them in Chicago Defender instead. If you only search the Post Tribune, you will undercount deaths in certain communities by a significant margin. I learned this the hard way trying to trace a family that I knew lived in the West Side neighborhood. Every death record from 1943 to 1958 showed up in city archives but absolutely nothing in the paper until I switched to the Defender's digitized run.
How To Actually Find The Obituaries
Start with the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis if you have the time. Their microfilm collection of the Gary Post Tribune is more complete than what Gary has locally. The library's staff is helpful but they won't dig through the reels for you. You need to know the date range before you walk in. I usually pull the Indiana Death Index first to get exact dates, then go straight to the microfilm reader. A single obituary takes about three minutes to locate on film once you're on the right date. The issue is finding the right date in a paper that ran forty to sixty pages a day. Obituaries were typically on page five or six, but sometimes they slipped to the back section depending on news volume that day. If you can't get to Indianapolis, the Lake County Records Building in Crown Point has some microfilm copies. They're in worse shape though. Several reels are scratched and the image quality drops off significantly on deaths from 1970 to 1982. You'll need to photograph what you can with your phone. The library allows this but the flash should be off and you'll want to move quickly through each page. A typical obituary run for a single family over three generations might involve looking at forty to sixty individual issues. That's four to six hours of microfilm work minimum. For the online route, Ancestry has the Gary Post Tribune database but it's hit or miss. The OCR quality on the older microfilm transfers is rough, especially for the 1940s issues where the paper stock had degraded before filming. I'd estimate you recover about sixty to seventy percent of actual obituaries through the digitized version. The rest require manual inspection. I keep a spreadsheet tracking which years I've confirmed through direct microfilm versus which ones I'm relying on the database for. It matters when you're writing something up later and need to cite your source properly.
A Specific Problem And What Worked
Last year I was working on a case where the death certificate said the person died in Gary in March 1967, the funeral home record confirmed the date, and the Social Security death index matched. Nothing in the Gary Post Tribune online database. I spent two hours manually scrolling through the microfilm for that month before I found it. The obituary had run on March 14th but the headline was formatted in a two-column layout that the OCR completely missed. It read as a block of undifferentiated text. What I did was print the page at the highest resolution the microfilm machine allowed and read it with my glasses on. The text was there, just misread by whatever scanning software they used back when they digitized this particular batch. I photographed it and uploaded it to the family's file. This happens more often than you'd think with papers from this era. Always verify critical records against the original image, not the searchable text. The value of these obituaries isn't just the death date and funeral home name. The ones from the 1950s and 1960s in particular often list surviving family members in ways that death certificates don't. They name spouses, children, siblings, sometimes even cousins or in-laws who are mentioned by first name only. That's where the generational connections happen. A single obituary from 1958 might give you the names of three living siblings who don't appear in any census record after 1940. Those names become search terms for the next generation of records. I usually cross-reference whatever I pull from the Post Tribune with the Indiana Historical Bureau's death index and the county health department records. The triad of sources catches most discrepancies. Sometimes the funeral home listed in the paper doesn't match what's on the death certificate. Those mismatches are worth noting because they can indicate that the family moved across county lines or that there was a family disagreement about arrangements. Neither is uncommon. It's just data points that tell you something about the family structure beyond dates and names.
Get the Full Details
There's a limit to how far back you can push this. After about 1920, the Post Tribune obituary coverage becomes thin. Before that, you're better off with church records, cemetery registers, and the earlier Gary Daily Tribune which had different editorial standards. The Post Tribune was a afternoon paper that catered to a specific readership and its coverage reflects that. It's a useful source but it's not comprehensive and treating it like one will waste your time. Go in knowing what it can and can't give you, verify the digitized records against original images, and build from there.
