Accessing Times Union Obituaries Through the Albany County Public Library
The Times Union has published obituaries in Albany, New York for well over a century, and the archives are substantial. If you're searching for someone who died in the Albany area between roughly 1985 and the present, you're looking at tens of thousands of records. Most of them are behind paywalls on the digital side, but the library system here has a workaround that actually works if you know how to use it. I've spent more afternoons than I care to admit digging through these archives for family research and local history projects. The process isn't straightforward, and the first few times I tried it, I wasted hours clicking around. Here's what I've learned.
Times Union Obituaries Albany New York Library Detail Navigating History And Remembrance Online
The Albany County Public Library system maintains subscription access to several newspaper databases that include Times Union obituaries. The primary route goes through their website. You need a valid library card from any Albany County member library to get past the login wall. If you live outside the county, some neighboring systems like Schenectady or Rensselaer may have reciprocal agreements, but those change periodically. Call your local branch and ask before you assume. Once you're logged in, navigate to the databases section. Look for either ProQuest Historical Newspapers or the Newspapers.com library edition. The Times Union obituary coverage differs between these two, and knowing which one holds what saves a lot of frustration. ProQuest tends to have the older material going back further, sometimes to the early 1980s depending on which index they're pulling from. The interface is clunky. Search results load slowly, and the PDF view of actual pages can timeout if you're on anything slower than a solid broadband connection. I usually keep a separate tab open just to hold my search query while I wait for results to populate.
Newspapers.com through the library has a cleaner search experience and better image quality for the microfilm scans. The tradeoff is that their Times Union coverage starts later and sometimes has gaps in certain months. I've noticed especially spotty coverage around the late 1990s into early 2000s for certain date ranges. Don't assume an absence in Newspapers.com means the obituary doesn't exist. It probably does. The most practical method I've found combines both. Run the name through Newspapers.com first since it's faster. If you get nothing or incomplete results, switch to ProQuest and do a broader search using the person's approximate death year and Albany as the location. That combination covers more ground than either tool alone. One thing that catches people off guard: the Times Union indexes obituaries separately from the main article archive in some of these databases. A standard newspaper search might pull up the death notice but miss the full obituary narrative that ran in the Sunday edition. Make sure your search parameters include the Obituary section or death notices category if the platform gives you that option. Filtering by document type instead of just keyword can double your hit rate on certain searches.
Get the Full Details
Here's a specific problem I ran into recently that took me two days to solve. I was looking for an obituary from 2003 for someone whose last name had a common spelling variant. The family pronounced it one way, but the newspaper typeset it differently. Newspapers.com's search didn't catch it. ProQuest had it under the alternate spelling. The workaround was to search by the first name plus the approximate year plus "Albany" without the last name at all, then scroll through the results manually. I found it on the third page of results. It's tedious, but it's the only way when the spelling is uncertain. If you need pre-1985 records, the online databases won't help much. The library has microfilm and microfiche for the older material. The Albany Central Library on State Street has a dedicated local history desk where staff can pull the relevant film. Going in person takes about twenty minutes if the materials are on site. They're often stored offsite and need a day or two for retrieval, so call ahead. The staff at that desk are knowledgeable but not particularly fast with explanations. They'll pull what you need if you give them a specific date range and name. Another detail worth noting: some Times Union obituaries from the 1970s through the mid-1990s were originally printed as stand-alone cards or folded inserts rather than standard article format. These don't always scan cleanly into the digital databases. The image quality can be poor, and OCR text search sometimes fails entirely on those pages. If you're researching someone from that era and the database returns no text match, you may still find the original image by browsing the issue page-by-page. It takes longer, but the visual record is there.
The biggest limitation of relying on the library system is access duration. Many of these databases operate on seat-based licensing, meaning only a certain number of concurrent users can be logged in at once. During peak hours, especially weekends when hobbyist researchers tend to log on, you can get locked out or throttled. I've experienced this myself around 10 AM on a Saturday when trying to download several obituary PDFs in succession. The system kicked me off mid-session. The workaround is to do your heavy downloading between 1 PM and 4 PM on weekdays when usage drops significantly. For anyone doing serious genealogical work, I'd also recommend cross-referencing with the New York State Death Index through the Department of Health. The Times Union obituaries list a death date, and the state index confirms whether that date matches the official record. Discrepancies between the two are more common than you'd think, usually due to editorial errors in the original obituary submission. Getting both records lets you spot those errors early. Printing or saving the obituaries is straightforward from both platforms. ProQuest lets you download full-page PDFs directly. Newspapers.com requires you to use their save or print function since direct downloads aren't available through the library tier. I keep a folder structure organized by year and then by last name. It takes extra time upfront but makes revisiting the material years later considerably easier.
The Albany County Public Library also offers interlibrary loan for physical copies of older obituary pages that haven't been digitized. This is a slow process, typically taking two to three weeks, but it's useful when you hit a gap in the digital record. The request form is on the library website under patron services. You'll need to provide the specific date and the deceased person's full name. Vague requests get returned without action.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
I spent about forty-five minutes last month tracing a great-uncle who died in 1998. Newspapers.com gave me the death notice and the funeral home information within five minutes. ProQuest had the full Sunday obituary with the extended family listings that the notice didn't include. The library catalog confirmed he was listed in the 1990 census for Albany. All of this from my kitchen table with a valid library card number. The alternative would have been a trip to the Central Library, waiting for microfilm retrieval, and possibly still coming up short on the 1998 material since not everything from that period has been digitized yet. The system works. It has gaps and frustrations built in. But for anyone researching family history or local documentation in the Albany area, it's the most complete publicly accessible source for Times Union obituaries without purchasing a commercial genealogy subscription directly.
