How to Navigate the Times Union Obituary Section Without Losing Your Mind
The Times Union runs one of the more comprehensive obituary sections in upstate New York, and if you have ever tried to search through it while dealing with actual grief, you know it can be a mess. I spent about three years helping people track down older obits for genealogy research, and I learned quickly that the website's search function is not very good at what it does best. The section itself is straightforward. It publishes death notices submitted by funeral homes and longer, more personal obituaries written by families. The recent section covers the current week, usually running about 40 to 60 names daily depending on the time of year. Spring and winter tend to be heavier. The Capital Region here means Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and the surrounding counties, though the paper also picks up names from places like Watervliet, Rensselaer, and parts of Saratoga. Here is the thing most people miss: the digital archive only goes back about five to seven years reliably. Before that, you are mostly working with the printed edition or microfilm at the Central Library downtown. The online search will return results for names you never meant to find because it indexes funeral home advertisements that mention the deceased as part of a pre-arranged arrangement notice. This caused me a real problem when I was tracking down a great-uncle who died in 2011. The search engine kept pulling up his brother's 2008 memorial service announcement, which mentioned my great-uncle by name in a list of surviving relatives. I ended up having to look at the actual printed page through the library's digital microfilm reader to confirm the dates. The workaround was simple enough once I figured it out. I stopped using the full-name search and instead searched by zip code combined with the last name. That narrowed it down to the right person within about ten minutes instead of spending an hour digging through unrelated results.
If you are looking for something specific, start with the advanced search. You can filter by date range, which is useful because the default sort order is not always by date of death. Sometimes it is by submission date, and those two things are not the same. A family might submit an obituary on a Wednesday for someone who passed the previous Sunday, so the death date and publication date end up being different. Factor that in when you are narrowing your search window. Give yourself a wider bracket than you think you need. The paid death notices are a different animal entirely. Funeral homes pay per line or per inch, so the ones that appear first in the listing are often the most expensive placements. These tend to be longer and more detailed, sometimes including photos. The free or low-cost notices are usually just a sentence or two with basic facts. If you are researching an ancestor and only see a tiny blurb, check whether the family might have paid for the full version elsewhere. Some families choose to publish the detailed version in a smaller local paper or on the funeral home's own website. I ran into this with a client whose grandmother had a three-line notice in the Union but a full-page spread at a funeral home in Colonie that was not cross-linked anywhere. Another detail people overlook is the index that runs on Sundays. The weekend edition compiles the past week's names into a single searchable index, and it catches some of the formatting errors that slip through during the week. If you are hunting for a name that keeps coming up empty, wait until Sunday and try again. It takes longer, but it usually works.
The limitations are real though. The site does not allow bulk downloads. If you need to pull fifty obits for a project, you are stuck copying them by hand. There is no API, no export function, nothing. The images attached to newer obituaries can sometimes be viewed individually, but there is no way to grab them all at once. And the mobile experience is poor. If you are trying to read an obit on your phone while sitting in a waiting room, expect it to be frustrating. The text wraps oddly and the back button sometimes takes you to the wrong page. For older records, the best alternative is the New York State Death Index through the Department of Health, but that only helps if you need a official death certificate, not the actual obituary text. The Albany County Historical Society also has a card file of obituaries going back much further, though accessing it requires an appointment and you cannot photograph everything. Bring a notebook. Bottom line: the Times Union obituary section is useful, it is well-kept, and it is worth the effort. Just do not trust the search bar on the first try. Adjust your filters, widen your date range, and be ready to dig a little bit past the obvious results.
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