How to Find and Read Times Union Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
The Times Union website has an obituary section that covers Albany County and surrounding areas in upstate New York. It updates constantly. If you are looking for someone who died recently, you do not have to dig through old archive pages or call the funeral home to figure out where they ran the notice. The paper posts them online the same day most of the time, sometimes within hours of the death being reported. I spent several months tracking down obituaries for a family genealogy project in the early 2020s. My grandmother had grown up in Schoharie County, and the records went back further than anything digitized at the county clerk's office. I found the bulk of what I needed through the Times Union's obituary archive, and it saved me from making three separate drives to the Albany Regional Archives.
Times Union Obituaries Of Last Three Days Honoring Lives And Stories That Shaped Our Community
To access the most recent obituaries, you go to timesunion.com and click on the obituaries tab, usually found in the top navigation bar or under the news menu. From there, you will see a list of the most recent entries. The page typically shows five to ten listings at a time, with the newest on top. Each entry includes the person's full name, age, date of death, a brief summary, and sometimes a link to a full-length notice if the family paid for an expanded version. The search function is basic but functional. You can filter by last name, first name, or full name. You can also narrow the date range, which is the most useful tool when you are looking for something specific. Set the date range to the exact three-day window you want, hit search, and you get a cleaned list. No need to scroll through weeks of older entries. One thing beginners miss: the Times Union allows you to sort by date, but the default sort is sometimes chronological order from oldest to newest rather than newest first. This seems minor until you are trying to find an obituary from yesterday and the page loads with entries from last Tuesday at the top. Refresh the page or flip the sort order and you save yourself a few minutes of confusion.
Another thing nobody tells you about these obituaries is that the full text often includes a lot of standard boilerplate. The family writes the biographical sketch, but the newspaper formats it with the same basic structure every time: surviving family members, preceding family deaths, service details, and donation suggestions. The real value is in the biographical paragraph, which usually contains the kind of specific detail that makes genealogy work easier—where the person worked, what school they attended, which military unit they served in, hobbies, church affiliation, and so on. I ran into a problem last year that I wish I had known about going in. I was looking for an obituary for a man who died in Schenectady but had lived most of his life in Albany. The Times Union listing used his middle name in the headline but his first name in the body text. I searched by his first name and got zero results. I searched by his middle initial and found it immediately. The fix was simply to try alternate name formats in the search field. The system indexes both first and middle names separately, so if a result does not show up on the first pass, change the name format and search again. There is also a paid subscription wall. The Times Union, like most newspapers now, requires a digital subscription to read the full obituary text. You can see the headline, age, date of death, and a short preview without paying, but the rest of the notice is locked behind a paywall. A single issue subscription runs about twelve dollars a month, though they occasionally offer promotional pricing. If you are only looking up a handful of obituaries, you can subscribe, read what you need, and cancel. If you need ongoing access for research, the monthly cost is reasonable compared to paying for document delivery from the state archives.
Get the Full Details
Sometimes the obituary is not fully available even with a subscription. I found this out when searching for a great-uncle who died in 2019. The Times Union only had the shorter notice, not the full memoir-style piece his family had originally submitted. The funeral home had sent the longer version to the paper, but the digital archive did not include it. In cases like this, the funeral home's own website sometimes hosts the full text. I called the parlor listed in the notice, asked politely, and they were happy to email me the original submission. It took five minutes. If you are doing serious research, the most efficient workflow I have found is this: use the date-range filter to pull obituaries from a specific three-day window, scan the headlines for relevant last names, open any that match, and save the URLs or print the pages before the subscription prompt cuts you off. I keep a folder on my computer labeled with the month and year, and I drop the PDFs or screenshots in there as I go. This prevents the problem of closing a tab and realizing too late that you needed more than the preview showed. There are limitations to this approach. The Times Union does not cover every community in upstate New York equally. Rural towns outside the immediate Albany-Schenectady-Troy corridor sometimes have their notices run in smaller papers like the Troy Daily Record or the Schenectady Gazette instead. If you are researching someone from a town like Fort Plain or Delanson, check those papers as well. The Times Union will list some notices from surrounding areas, but the coverage is spotty past a certain radius.
The other limitation is that obituaries are not always posted on the day of death. I have seen delays of two to three days, especially over weekends or holidays. If someone died on a Saturday and the family is arranging things during a holiday weekend, the notice may not appear until Monday or Tuesday. Plan your search window accordingly and add a buffer day or two if the timing does not align perfectly. For most people who just want to find out if someone they knew has passed, the Times Union obituary section is fast and reliable enough. You do not need any special tools. A browser, a last name, and maybe a middle name variation are all you really need. The real advantage comes if you know how to navigate the search filters and handle the paywall without wasting time. I have been doing this long enough that I can usually find what I need in under ten minutes now, whereas the first time around it took me half a day of trial and error.
