How to Find and Read Times News Obituaries in Lehighton

I've spent a fair amount of time navigating the obituary section of the Times News over the years, mostly because people in this area tend to want proper notices for their families. Lehighton sits right in Carbon County, and the paper has been covering death notices going back decades. If you're looking for times news obituaries Lehighton, here's how I usually handle it.

Searching Times News Obituaries Lehighton Honoring Lives Preserving History In The Heart Of The Poconos

The first thing most people don't realize is that the Times News website doesn't keep everything searchable in one place. I've had clients call me after spending twenty minutes scrolling through archived PDFs because the online archive cuts off at certain dates, and the remainder lives in the newspaper's physical files or on microfilm at the local library. Start with the website. Go to thetimesnews.com and look for the Obituaries section. The site typically runs a daily column of death notices alongside full-length obituaries. The difference matters because a death notice is just a brief announcement with basic facts, while an obituary is a fuller story written by family members or the newspaper staff. I remember one search last spring where someone was trying to find information about a relative who died in 2019. The website had the full obituary from that year, but when I needed to verify the funeral home listed, the citation was slightly different from what the family remembered. Turns out the funeral home had changed names between 2017 and 2020, and the obituary used the old name while everyone in the community knew it by the new one. That mismatch cost us about an hour of phone calls before we figured it out. The workaround was straightforward: I called the current funeral home directly and asked them what they'd been called previously. They pulled up their old branding records and confirmed it within ten minutes.

The Archive Problem

Here's something the website doesn't advertise prominently. The Times News keeps an online archive, but it's incomplete for any period before about 2015, and even then some articles from that era link to pages that no longer exist. I've had good luck with the Google News archive, which sometimes catches obituaries that the newspaper itself dropped from its active site. The trick is searching with the person's full name plus "Lehighton" rather than just the name, because obituaries from small papers often don't get indexed well by search engines unless the location is included. The Pocono connection is worth noting. Lehighton sits in the coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and the Times News has covered this community since the late 1800s. That means the paper has a deep record of local deaths, but it also means obituaries from the early twentieth century might use spelling conventions or place names that seem odd today. I've seen "Lehighton" spelled "Lehighton" with variations in older records, and the newspaper itself standardized the spelling relatively recently. If you're researching family history going back further than fifty years, you'll want to check the Carbon County historical society. They have the original clippings organized by date, and the staff there knows the local naming conventions better than anyone I've met.

Death Notices versus Obituaries

People often confuse these two things, and mixing them up can mess up your research. A death notice in the Times News is usually paid by the family and follows a standard template. It lists the deceased, the surviving family, the funeral service details, and sometimes a brief donation request. These tend to be consistent from year to year because the newspaper runs them through a submission system with preset fields. An obituary is a different animal. These are longer pieces, sometimes two or three columns, that tell the actual story of someone's life. Family members often write these themselves and submit them to the paper, which means the style and content vary wildly depending on who wrote it. Some are straightforward and factual. Others read more like personal essays with religious passages or inside jokes that only the family understood. I once spent forty-five minutes trying to figure out whether a particular obituary was from 2012 or 2014 because the writer included references to events that could fit either year. The clue that settled it was a mention of a local high school graduation that only happened once in that timeframe. Cross-referencing that with the school's archived yearbook photos gave me the exact date.

Local Customs and Regional Patterns

What makes the Lehighton obituaries distinctive is the regional character of the area. This is a community with deep roots in the coal industry, and you'll see that reflected in the notices. Many obituaries mention decades of work at local mines or steel plants, along with union affiliations that mean something to readers but look like random acronyms to outsiders. The religious element also shows up frequently, with churches like St. John's Catholic Church or the local Baptist congregations mentioned alongside funeral home details. One thing I've noticed over the years. Obits from the warmer months, especially around Memorial Day through Labor Day, tend to be shorter and more formulaic. People seem to prefer getting the business done quickly when the weather is nice and there's a lot happening in the community. Winter obituaries, particularly around January and February, run longer. I think it's because people have more time on their hands during the cold months, or maybe because there simply aren't as many other distractions in a small town like this. Either way, if you're looking for detailed biographical information, the winter issues of the Times News are your best bet.

Using the Physical Newspaper

If the online search isn't working for you, consider checking the actual newspaper. The Lehighton public library keeps a complete run of the Times News going back to the early twentieth century, and the staff will let you browse the microfilm or pull the original pages if the binding permits. I usually recommend going on a weekday morning when the library is less crowded and the librarian has time to help you navigate the archive properly. Weekend visits tend to be rushed because the library runs short-staffed during those hours. The physical copy has advantages that the digital version lacks. You can see the layout of the obituary section as it appeared on the day of publication, which sometimes reveals family relationships that don't come through in the text alone. I've found sibling connections, former marriages, and remarriages just by looking at the arrangement of notices on a single page. The newspaper staff tends to group related families together, so if you're researching one person and their notice appears next to another family's death announcement, there's a good chance those households had some connection. That kind of spatial information doesn't translate well to a website search result.

Funeral Home Records

Another source worth checking is the funeral home that handled the services. Most funeral homes in the Carbon County area keep their own records going back twenty or thirty years, and some will share death information with family members or authorized researchers. The staff at these businesses knows the local families personally, which means they can often fill in gaps that the newspaper didn't cover or correct details that got messed up during the obituary writing process. A practical limitation to keep in mind. Funeral homes aren't required to keep records indefinitely, and some destroy files after a set period for privacy reasons. If you're trying to find information about a death that happened more than forty years ago, the funeral home might not have anything on file. In those cases, the Times News archive at the library becomes your primary resource, supplemented by church records if the family was actively religious. I've had mixed success with this approach depending on how diligent the particular congregation was about maintaining membership rolls and baptismal records from earlier decades.

Common Pitfalls

People make the same mistakes repeatedly when searching local obituaries. The biggest one is assuming the name on the death notice matches what's in family Bibles or personal records. Spelling variations, nicknames, and middle name usage differ between official documents and how people actually introduced themselves in the community. I once spent an afternoon looking for an obituary under "Robert" when the person was known locally as "Bert," and the family Bible listed "Bertram." The notice went by Bert, and no one in the community called him Robert except his official paperwork. That wasted about two hours before I finally asked around at the post office, where the clerk confirmed the nickname and pointed me toward the correct article. Another frequent error is searching by the date of death rather than the date of publication. Newspapers typically run obituaries one to three days after the death, sometimes longer if the family takes time to write the notice or arrange the funeral. I've seen cases where the death occurred on a Sunday and the obituary didn't appear until Thursday's edition, which threw off anyone searching by the death date alone. If you're tracking down a specific person, it's safer to search a window of several days on either side of the known death date rather than hitting exactly the date itself.

Alternative Resources

If the Times News isn't turning up what you need, there are other local sources worth checking. The Allentown Morning Call also covers Carbon County deaths and sometimes runs obituaries for people who lived in Lehighton but wanted to be buried in neighboring counties. The Reading Eagle has a similar regional reach, and the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader picks up some Pocono-area deaths depending on which direction the family leaned culturally. I usually recommend checking all three if the Times News search comes up empty, though this multi-paper approach typically adds an extra hour or two to the research process. The state-level resources include the Pennsylvania Death Index, which provides basic death certificate information including date, location, and certificate number. This won't give you the full obituary text, but it confirms that a death occurred and provides the official documentation trail. The certificate number from this index lets you request the full death record from the state health department, though processing times for those requests currently run about three to four weeks depending on the volume of applications.