Finding and Using Times Leader Obituaries for Genealogy Research
Most people think pulling records from the Times Leader is straightforward, but if you've spent time in these archives you know that's not really how it works. The obituary collection covers Luzerne County and surrounding areas in northeastern Pennsylvania, and it's useful, but there are quirks that trip up anyone who hasn't dealt with them directly. The Times Leader is a daily newspaper based in Wilkes-Barre, and their obituary section has been running for decades. I've spent a lot of time going through these records when helping people trace family lines through Luzerne and Lackawanna counties. The digital archive goes back to around 1997, but the quality of what you can actually find online varies a lot depending on when and how the obituaries were originally published. Here's how the archive works. The Times Leader uses a system provided by Tribune Content Agency for their digital obituaries. When someone dies in the coverage area, the family or funeral home submits the obituary, it gets typeset, and then published in both the print edition and on the newspaper's website. The web version stays up indefinitely, but the free search functionality is limited. You can do name searches, date range searches, and sometimes location filtering. The results you get back aren't always clean because OCR processing on older scanned pages introduces errors, especially with older fonts and degraded paper quality.
I ran into a specific problem last year when researching a family line from Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The ancestor I was looking for, James McGettigan, died in 2003, and I could see from genealogical databases that an obituary existed. I searched the Times Leader archive using standard name matching and got nothing. The issue was that his name was listed as "Jim McGettigan" in the actual obituary, which the headline used but the body text did not. The search index pulled from the metadata and headline rather than the full text in some cases. My workaround was to search by the date range instead. I narrowed it to the week of his death, plus a few days on either side, and scanned the results manually. That's when I found it. This kind of gap between what you expect and what the search actually indexes is something you learn pretty quickly if you do this work regularly. Another thing that catches people off guard is the coverage boundary. The Times Leader's official circulation area includes Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, Kingston, Nanticoke, and parts of surrounding townships, but obituaries from places like Scranton or Hanover don't always appear here because those fall under different publication territories. I had a case where someone insisted their ancestor's obituary must be in the Times Leader because the death occurred in Luzerne County, but the person actually lived just across the county line in Lackawanna County and would have been covered by the Times Union instead. The boundary between these paper territories is not perfectly aligned with county lines, which makes sense since newspapers were organized around distribution routes, not municipal boundaries. If you want to access the archive, the primary path is through the Times Leader website at timesleader.com. You navigate to the obituaries section and use their search interface. You can also access it through NewsBank, which some public libraries provide as part of their database subscriptions. The NewsBank version sometimes has better full-text search because it applies different OCR processing, but it requires a library card or subscription. Ancestry.com also carries some Times Leader obituary content, but their coverage is incomplete and often lags behind the newspaper's own archive by several months. For serious research, the direct newspaper site or NewsBank are your best options.
There are downsides worth being upfront about. The free search on the newspaper's site will only let you view a limited number of results before prompting you to create an account. Even with an account, some older entries from before the mid-2000s may not have full-text search available because they were digitized from microfilm rather than born digital. The resolution of those scans is inconsistent, and some pages are too faded or poorly oriented for OCR to read reliably. If you hit a wall with the digital archive, the next step is usually interlibrary loan of the microfilm from the Luzerne County Historical Society or the university library at King's College in Wilkes-Barre, which holds a complete run. A couple of counter-intuitive things to keep in mind. First, obituaries from the 1990s and earlier that were part of the print paper are generally more reliable than you'd expect because the original typesetting meant the text was already in a searchable format before digitization. The really messy OCR problems tend to show up with newspaper sections that were scanned from photographs of physical pages rather than from digital source files. Second, many people overlook the birth announcements section in the same archive. When a direct death record is missing, a birth announcement for the same person's child or a sibling can establish the family structure well enough to fill gaps that the obituary alone wouldn't provide. I've used this approach to confirm relationships in at least three families where the death records were incomplete or the obituary had been submitted with incorrect dates. The timescales matter too. If you're searching for someone who died recently, say within the last five years, the digital record will almost certainly exist and be fully searchable. For deaths between 1997 and 2010, you'll hit roughly a 30 percent gap where records exist but are either missing from the index or only available in low-quality scanned form. Pre-1997 is effectively the microfilm route unless you're also checking the Times Leader's own printed archival books, which some local historical societies reference.
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