Finding Obituaries in the Times Daily Archives
The Times Daily runs obituaries out of Florence, Alabama, and over the years I have pulled hundreds of them for genealogy work and legal research. The paper covers Lauderdale County and the broader North Alabama area, including Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and parts of surrounding counties. If you know the person's name and approximate date, the process is straightforward. If you do not, it gets slower. I used to spend too long searching through the index before realizing the paper tags obituaries under multiple headings: full names, maiden names, and sometimes just the first initial of a middle name. The first thing I tell people is to not rely on the search bar alone. It misses records where the headline differs from the byline or where the PDF version of the paper rearranges things. Here is how the process actually works in practice.
The Search Process
Go to the Times Daily website and use their archive search. Enter the full name of the deceased, then narrow by date range and location. You want to search the Florence area specifically because the same name can show up from Huntsville or Shelby County records that end up cross-listed. The obituary section is usually under the "News" tab, then "Obituaries" or "Death Notices." The Times Daily also publishes a daily obituary roundup on their site that lists recent deaths with links to the full article. These roundups are useful but incomplete. The full text lives in the archived newspaper page, which is where the real detail is. When I need older records, say before 2010, the website archives get spotty. Some editions are missing page scans entirely. I have found myself needing to go through microfilm at the Lauderdale County Public Library or requesting digital copies through their interlibrary system. The library staff there is competent and will pull the right page if you give them a date and name, but expect a two to three day turnaround unless you are doing it in person.
What You Will Find in These Obituaries
A well-written Times Daily obituary includes the full name of the deceased, age, residence, date of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, service details, and often a short biographical paragraph. The biographical section is where the actual legacy information lives — military service, occupation, church affiliation, clubs, immigration history, and surviving siblings with their locations. That is the part most people skip when they are just scanning for a date. One thing that trips people up is that the Times Daily sometimes publishes shorter death notices instead of full obituaries, especially for people who died out of state or in care facilities. A death notice might be two paragraphs long and list only the funeral home and service time. You will miss critical genealogical data in those cases. My workaround is to check Funeralwise or local funeral home websites alongside the Times Daily record. The funeral home that handled arrangements usually posts a more complete version of the obituary, sometimes with photos and a full family roster.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls
Name changes after marriage are the biggest issue. A woman who married later in life and was known professionally under her married name may be listed under her maiden name in the obituary. I ran into this with a great-aunt whose obituary listed her by her first husband's surname even though she had been known locally by her second husband's name for twenty years. I missed the record entirely on my first search because I only looked up the name she used in later life. Another problem is duplicate entries. The Times Daily occasionally runs the same obituary in both the print edition and the online death notice board with slightly different wording. Do not count one as two different people without verifying. I wasted an afternoon cross-referencing what I thought were two separate records for the same man because the online version had a different birth date listed due to a typographical error in the submission. The date range filter on their search is not always accurate. I have seen results appear one day before or after the actual publication date because the paper holds certain pages for later distribution or digital upload delays. Always confirm the date against the image of the page itself, not just the metadata tag.
Practical Tips for Research
Use Ancestry.com or Fold3 as a supplementary resource. They have scanned obituaries from the Times Daily that are sometimes indexed differently than the current website search. Ancestry's obituary collection for Alabama tends to include records going back to the late 1990s, though coverage is inconsistent before 2005. If you are doing serious genealogical work on a Florence-area family, buy the annual subscription to the paper's archive access. It costs about sixty dollars a year and saves you from hitting paywalls after the third article. The free tier only lets you view a handful of obituaries before asking you to create an account and pay per article. For records before 2000, the Lauderdale County probate court maintains estate files that correspond to each death. An obituary will reference the executor or administrator of the estate. Take that name and pull the probate file at the courthouse. Those files contain the death certificate, will, inventory of assets, and sometimes letters from family members that are far more detailed than anything in the newspaper. This step usually adds about four hours of research time but gives you documents that no obituary can provide.
The obituary section of the Times Daily is a solid primary source for North Alabama family history. It is not flawless. Gaps exist in the digitized archive, search accuracy varies, and the submissions themselves depend on whoever wrote the original text. But for the period after 2003, it is one of the best publicly available resources for the Florence area, and for earlier decades the combination of paper archives, probate records, and funeral home websites fills in most of the blanks.
