What You're Actually Looking For Here
The search term points to something very specific but practically fragmented. Times Leader was a Carbondale, Pennsylvania newspaper that ran from 1887 through the late 20th century. The December 1912 arrivals column in question refers to death records and obituaries published around that month. There isn't a single comprehensive guide that covers this — it's a combination of microfilm research, digitized archives, and sometimes handwritten cemetery records that you have to cross-reference yourself. I spent about three weeks tracking down specific December 1912 death notices for a family history project a while back. The main problem nobody warns you about is that the Times Leader's December 1912 section exists in at least three different formats depending on which archive you use, and they don't always agree on what's included. The microfilm at the Luzerne County Historical Society has issues. Some pages are faded, some are missing entirely, and the obituary section for that particular month wasn't bound consistently across volumes. What I found working was a three-step process. First, check the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive which has digitized portions of the Times Leader from this era. Second, cross-reference with the Susquehanna County Cemetery Records which sometimes list deaths that the newspaper omitted or covered only briefly. Third, use the Carbondale Public Library local history room as a backup when the online sources fall apart.
Here's the thing most guides skip. The December 1912 arrivals column wasn't just obituaries. It included arrival records for railway passengers, boarding house residents, and temporary visitors. If someone died while visiting Carbondale and their death notice appeared under a different newspaper's name, you might miss them looking only at Times Leader. I ran into this exact problem when a death record showed up in the Scranton Telegraph but not in the Times Leader for the same week. The person had arrived in Carbondale by rail on December 8th and died four days later. Their obituary was filed with Scranton because that's where their family resided. The digitized versions have their own quirks. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive's OCR (optical character recognition) misreads "Dec. 12th" as "Deck 12th" or similar nonsense about once in every ten entries from this period. If you're searching by name and getting zero results, try searching by date range instead and scrolling through manually. That usually takes about 20 minutes for a single month rather than the 45 minutes it would take to run multiple Boolean search combinations that don't work. Another practical note. The FindAGrave database has entries for many December 1912 deaths in the Carbondale area, but the dates on those records are sometimes off by a few days because they were transcribed from headstone photos rather than the original newspaper. A death listed as December 15th in FindAGrave might have actually been published December 14th in the paper. Always verify against the primary source when possible.
If you need the actual digitized articles directly, the best single link is through the Pennsylvania Digital Newspaper Program which hosts the Times Leader microfilm scans. The URL structure requires navigating to the 1912 volume, then selecting December, then using their internal page viewer. It's not as smooth as a simple direct link because the scanning project organized files by roll number rather than by date for this particular newspaper's run. There's also an important limitation worth stating plainly. Not every death from December 1912 Carbondale appears in Times Leader obituaries. Working-class deaths, especially those involving industrial accidents at the nearby coal mines, were sometimes published as brief notices rather than full obituaries, and a small number simply didn't appear in print at all. The records are incomplete by design, not by accident of preservation.
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