Why Local Obituaries Matter More Than You Think
The Hammond Times has been publishing obituaries since the early 1900s, and honestly, they are one of the most underused resources for local historical research. Most people read an obituary once, maybe twice, and file it away. They are not meant to be filed. They are meant to be mined. Every single one contains structured and unstructured data — birth dates, surviving family members, military service, church affiliations, employer names, neighbor addresses — that rarely appears elsewhere in any single document. I have spent the last eight years pulling obituaries out of the Hammond Times archives and cross-referencing them with census records, draft cards, death certificates, and city directories. What I am about to tell you is not academic theory. It is the result of actually doing this work and running into the problems that make it frustrating. A standard Hammond Times obituary from the 1950s onward typically follows a pattern, but the pattern is not consistent enough to rely on blindly. The basic structure includes the deceased's full name, age at death, date of death, location of death, funeral home handling arrangements, surviving family members listed by relationship, and often a brief biographical paragraph. Pre-1960s obituaries tend to be shorter and less detailed. Post-1980s ones vary wildly depending on whether the family paid for a standard template or a longer custom layout. Length matters. A two-column obituary gives you roughly half the data of a four-column one.
The biographical paragraph is where most researchers miss critical information. That is the section that mentions where someone grew up, what school they attended, which union they belonged to, or what plant they worked at for thirty years. Those details are gold when you are building a family history or researching local industrial history. The rest of the obituary — the survival list, the service time — is useful too, but it is predictable. The bio paragraph is the only section that tells you something new.
How to Access The Archives
The Hammond Times archive is available through Newspapers.com, which requires a subscription. The local library in Hammond may also have microfilm or scanned copies on site. If you are doing serious research, a Newspapers.com subscription is worth it, but not because it is perfect. It is worth it because it is searchable, and searching is the only way this process works at scale. Browsing microfilm page by page will consume an entire day and yield far less than an afternoon of keyword searches. When you search, do not just search by the person's name. Search by their spouse's name, their child's name, or even their employer. Obituaries frequently mention a surviving brother or sister who shares the same surname, and if you are researching a family line, that connection can bridge gaps that census records leave open. I found a entire branch of a Polish immigrant family in Hammond by searching for a sister-in-law mentioned in passing inside a husband's obituary. That sister-in-law would never have appeared in my initial search.
Get the Full Details
Extracting Data Without Losing Your Mind
Here is the practical part. When I pull an obituary, I transcribe it into a spreadsheet immediately. I do not trust my memory and I do not trust coming back to it later. My spreadsheet has columns for: full name, known aliases, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, place of death, parents' names, spouse's name, children's names, siblings' names, military service branch and conflict, employer, church affiliation, burial location, funeral home, and source citation. That last column is non-negotiable. You will need it three months from now when you forget where that information came from. The problem that trips people up most often is inconsistent naming. A woman might be listed as "Marion Elizabeth Kowalski" in one obituary and "Elizabeth Kowalski" in another. Men get nicknames in quotes — "Robert 'Bob' Martinez" — and the nickname version shows up in indexes but the formal name shows up in the text. I keep a separate alias column in my spreadsheet for exactly this reason. When I hit a dead end, I go back and check the nickname variant. It solves more problems than people expect.
A Specific Problem I Ran Into
Last year I was researching a man who died in 1974. The obituary listed his wife as surviving but gave only her first name, "Margaret." The census records showed a "Margaret" married to him, but the birth years did not align perfectly. I spent three days going in circles before I realized the obituary had mentioned a daughter who was married and living in Gary, Indiana. I searched for that daughter by name in later Hammond Times archives and found her own wedding announcement from 1968, which included her mother's full name: Margaret Ann Teslikowski. That middle name was the key. It matched the census record I had been struggling with. The lesson here is that the obituary's survival list is not just a list of names. It is a network. Following the connected names outward is often more productive than re-reading the original document. Obituaries are not reliable sources for every detail. The information is supplied by the family, not verified by the newspaper. Dates of birth are frequently approximate, especially for older individuals who may not have known their exact birth date. Immigrant ancestors sometimes had their ages rounded to the nearest five years in these notices. Spelling of foreign surnames is inconsistent across publications — a single family might appear as "Nowak," "Novak," and "Novack" in different issues depending on who wrote the piece and what their typographical habits were. The biggest structural weakness is that obituaries reflect what the family chose to include, not what actually happened. A military veteran might not be honored if the family did not want to draw attention to a contentious discharge. A second marriage might be omitted entirely if the surviving family from the first marriage handled the arrangements. An estranged child will not be mentioned. These silences are themselves data. If someone's obituary is unusually short or missing details that other sources confirm existed, that gap tells you something about the family dynamics. Document the gap. Do not assume the record is complete because it exists.
Advanced Cross-Referencing
Once you have transcribed a batch of obituaries, the next step is to cross-reference them against the 1940 and 1950 census schedules, which are publicly available through the National Archives. The census gives you household composition, occupation, and residence at a fixed point in time. The obituary gives you the endpoints — birth, death, and everything in between that the family remembered. Together they create a timeline that neither source can produce alone. SSDI records and Social Security applications are another layer. The obituary confirms the death date. The SSDI confirms the last address and the benefit amount, which indirectly tells you something about economic status. This is not glamorous work, but it is systematic and it works.
When It Falls Short
If you are researching someone who died before 1920, you will find far fewer obituaries in the Hammond Times. Many early notices were minimal — a single paragraph stating the name, date, and a brief phrase. For that period, you should rely more heavily on church records, cemetery transcriptions, and county clerk records. The obituary is still useful when you find one, but it is not the primary source for pre-1920 research. Do not waste time searching for an obituary that may not exist. Move on to the next repository.
Final Practical Note
The process is tedious. I will not pretend otherwise. You will spend hours reading dense columns of text that repeat the same structural formulas. But the payoff is real. A single obituary can confirm three relationships, two locations, and an employer in one sitting. Do the transcription work. Follow the connected names. Keep your own records organized. The archive is there, and it is better than most people give it credit for.
