Reading Obituaries in the Scranton Times
If you've tried looking up today's Scranton Times obituaries to find information about someone from northeastern Pennsylvania, you've probably run into the usual frustrating experience. The newspaper moved a lot of its archive online, but the obituary section is a mess of paywalls, broken links, and incomplete records. I spent a few weeks trying to track down a relative's death notice last year and ended up learning how the whole system actually works the hard way. The Scranton Times-Tribune publishes obituaries daily, usually in a dedicated section near the back of the paper. The online version lives at obs.bizjournals.com through the Press Connection system, which is what most Northeastern Pennsylvania newspapers use now. You can access current listings without a subscription for a limited number of articles per month. After that, you hit a wall. Here's what most people don't realize about searching these records. The newspaper only runs obituaries submitted by funeral homes or families. If someone died without arranging formal services through an established funeral home, there might be no public record at all. I found this out when searching for a man who passed away in a nursing home with no next of kin willing to handle arrangements. His death was recorded in state mortality files, but the newspaper never mentioned him. Nothing in print, nothing online.
The practical way to search for recent obituaries starts at the newspaper's own website. Go to scranntimes.com and navigate to the obituaries section. The search interface lets you filter by name, date range, and location. It works reasonably well for records from roughly 2015 onward. Before that date, things get messy because the paper was called the Scranton Tribune until a merger, and the archived content is spotty at best. For older records, try the Pennsylvania Death Index through the state government. It's free and covers deaths going back to 1906. You can search by name and county. Luzerne, Lackawanna, and Carbon counties are the main ones covered for this area. The index gives you the date of death, age, and county, but not the actual obituary text. Pair it with newspaperarchive.com, which has scanned copies of the Scranton papers going back decades, but you need a paid subscription there. I ran into a specific problem last fall that took me a while to work around. I was looking for an obituary for someone whose name had been anglicized from its original spelling. The funeral home had filed it under an Americanized version, but family records showed the original spelling. The online search returned zero results. I called the Scranton Times-Tribune obituary desk directly. They looked it up by the filing date and confirmed the name as it appeared in print. The workaround is simple but not obvious: call the newspaper. The obituary editor can search their internal system by date and cross-reference misspellings. It takes about five minutes on the phone instead of hours of failed online searches.
Another thing worth noting is that obituary content has changed significantly over the years. Twenty years ago, you'd get detailed life summaries, career history, surviving family members, and service information. Modern obituaries are often much shorter. Some are just a paragraph listing survivors and directing people to a memorial website. The press connection platform that handles submissions lets funeral homes control exactly what appears, and many have started treating obituaries as promotional content rather than genuine life records. If you're researching family history specifically, the obituary section alone won't get you far. You'll want to combine it with cemetery records, which the Lackawanna County Cemetery Association maintains, and civil registrations from the county clerk's office. Death certificates are public records in Pennsylvania but cost around ten dollars per copy and require a legitimate research purpose to obtain. Most people don't know they can request these through the local probate court rather than going through the state health department, which adds unnecessary time. The main limitation of relying on newspaper obituaries is that they represent only a fraction of actual deaths in the area. People who died in out-of-state hospitals, those without family to arrange publications, and individuals from smaller communities outside the Scranton media market often don't appear. A reasonable estimate is that the Scranton Times captures about sixty to seventy percent of local deaths in any given year. The rest go unreported in print.
Get the Full Details
For ongoing research, I'd recommend setting up a Google alert for specific names combined with "Scranton" and "died" or "passed away." It catches new listings across multiple local news sources, including smaller blogs and community pages that sometimes pick up obituary information before the main paper does. It's not perfect, but it's faster than checking the paper manually every day.
