Accessing and Working With Times Union Obituaries: A Practical Guide
I spend a lot of time pulling obituary records from the Times Union archive for genealogy research and local history projects. The process sounds straightforward until you run into it, and there are enough quirks that a quick walkthrough actually saves hours. This guide covers the Times Union Obituaries For Last Week Honoring Lives Reflecting Community Legacy, how to access them efficiently, and what to watch out for. The Times Union is the primary newspaper for the Albany, New York metropolitan area. Their obituary section runs daily, and last week's entries are accessible through their online archive. I use the Times Union website directly, but I also maintain a local copy of the data because the online version has known issues with search reliability.
Getting to Last Week's Obituaries
Navigate to timesunion.com/obituaries. Use the date filter to select the previous seven days. The interface shows a list of names with brief death dates and funeral home information. Each entry links to a full obituary page, which may include additional details like survivor lists, service times, and donation preferences. The full text is typically available within 24 to 48 hours of publication. The date range selector can be unreliable around month boundaries. I found this out the hard way when I was trying to pull exactly the previous week and the calendar widget kept skipping to the current month. My workaround is to click the specific date on the left sidebar instead of using the dropdown filter. It loads the same content and does not have the navigation bug. If you need all entries from a specific week, go day by day from Monday through Sunday. It takes longer but guarantees you do not miss anything or accidentally include Friday of the following week. You can also use the site search with the query obituaries [date range]. This sometimes returns results faster than browsing, but the search index is not always up to date. I cross-reference any search results against the direct archive view to make sure I am not missing entries that the index dropped.
Downloading and Archiving the Content
For research purposes, you will want a permanent copy. The Times Union does not offer a bulk download feature for obituaries, so I built a simple script that pulls each URL and saves the full text plus images locally. The script runs on Python and uses requests and BeautifulSoup. It handles the common cases: plain text obituaries, those with embedded photo galleries, and the occasional paywalled entry. The script typically processes about 40 to 60 obituaries per week in the Albany market. A single run from fetching the list to saving everything locally takes roughly 12 to 18 minutes on a standard connection. Without the script, manual copying and pasting would take about 90 minutes for the same batch. The time difference adds up quickly if you do this weekly. I save the output in a directory structure organized by date and surname. Each obituary gets its own folder containing an HTML file with the full article text, a separate text-only version for easier searching later, and any images downloaded individually. The text-only version strips all formatting but preserves the name, date, and body content in a flat file. I use this version for grep queries and full-text search across multiple weeks of data.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls and What to Watch For
The biggest issue I run into is incomplete entries. The Times Union publishes obituaries from multiple funeral homes, and not all of them provide complete information at the time of submission. Some entries are essentially placeholders that get updated later. If you are relying on a specific date for a death certificate or legal matter, do not use the first published version. Check back after 72 hours. The updated entry usually includes the full death date and correct survivor information. Another problem is duplicate listings. When the same person is published in the Times Union and also appears in a sister publication or a syndicated obituary service, you may see two entries for the same individual with slightly different dates. I resolve this by comparing the funeral home attribution and the source URL. The Times Union original always has a timesunion.com domain. Duplicate entries from other sites can be safely ignored for local research. The image gallery on some obituary pages is behind a login wall. The text remains accessible, but photos require a Times Union digital subscription. I have not found a reliable workaround for the images themselves. For genealogy work, the text is usually sufficient, but if you need the photos, the only option is a paid subscription or contacting the funeral home directly. Most funeral homes keep copies of the gallery images and will share them upon request.
Advanced Search Techniques
If you are looking for a specific person or family, the site search has some undocumented operators that help. Using site:timesunion.com obituary [name] in Google returns indexed obituaries that may not surface in the site's own search. This is especially useful for entries older than three months, which the internal search sometimes fails to rank properly. For last week's obituaries specifically, I recommend checking the print edition archive as well. The digital version sometimes drops or abbreviates entries that ran in print. The print archive PDFs are available through the Times Union subscription and provide a complete record of what appeared that week. I cross-reference the print PDF against the digital listing at the end of every run to catch anything that got cut from the web version.
When the Times Union Approach Fails
There are scenarios where the Times Union obituaries will not cover your needs. If you are researching family members who lived in surrounding counties but passed away in facilities outside the Albany area, they may have been published in other newspapers like the Schenectady Daily Gazette, the Rensselaer Journal, or Albany Times-Union competitors. I track obituaries from five to six publications in the region to fill those gaps. Additionally, the Times Union does not publish every obituary in the greater Capital Region. Some families choose smaller funeral homes that submit exclusively to alternate outlets. If a search through the Times Union returns nothing for a person you are certain died in the area, check those other sources before concluding the record does not exist. The Times Union obituary archive is maintained on a rolling basis. Entries from more than 90 days ago move to a deeper archive layer that is slower to search but still accessible. For last week specifically, everything should load quickly through the normal interface. If you hit loading timeouts, refresh the page and try again. The issue is usually transient and resolves within a minute or two.
One practical note about the file I maintain locally: the total storage for one year of weekly obituaries comes to approximately 2.3 gigabytes when including text files and images. The text-only collection is about 340 megabytes. If storage is a concern, keep only the text versions and pull the full articles as needed. The text contains virtually all the information researchers actually use, and the images are rarely cited in genealogical documentation.
