How We Archive and Publish the Obituaries Down Here
The first time I tried to track down a death record from the CTA tunnels, I ended up at three different municipal offices with nothing but a case number and a name. That was years ago. Now the process is mostly streamlined, but the gaps are still there. You need to know where they are before you even start looking. Tube City Obituaries Honoring The Legacy Of Passings In The Underground World started as a Google Group in 2008. It was basically two guys comparing obituaries from the Tribune with death certificates pulled from Cook County. One of them disappeared from the project around 2014. The rest of us kept going because someone had to.
What We Actually Cover
We document individuals who died in connection with the underground transit system — falls onto the tracks, incidents during the shift between steam and electric eras, ventilation tunnel fatalities, and the less discussed category of suicides that happened on the rails. We do not cover deaths of people who just happened to be standing on a platform when a heart attack hit. There is a boundary and it matters for how we file the records. The underground world also includes the construction crews. People who died building the tunnels. That's a separate subset and the documentation is worse because a lot of it was never filed in any accessible way. The 1957 Adams station collapse still doesn't have a complete roster that I can verify. I have a notebook from 1993 with eighteen names and half of them I never tracked down.
The Research Process
Here is how I do it now. I start with the CTA incident log for the relevant date range. That is public through FOIA requests but the processing time is anywhere from six weeks to four months depending on which records division you hit. I submitted a request in 2021 for the 1983-1987 period and got 340 pages. Sixteen of those pages mentioned a fatality. The rest was routine equipment reports. From there I pull the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune archives. The Tribune's digital archive is behind a paywall but the microfilm at the Newberry Library is free. I cross-reference the name from the incident log with the obituary or death notice. Sometimes the name in the CTA report is a partial match or initials only. That is the hard part. I also check the Cook County coroner's index online. It goes back to 1990 in searchable form. Before that you are working with physical ledgers at the county archives. I spent a Tuesday in March 2019 flipping through ledgers for 1962 and found a notation that changed how I filed two cases from that year. The coroner had originally listed one death as accidental and the family later pushed for it to be reclassified. The margin notes showed the dispute. That detail matters for the obituary because it changes how the person is remembered and how their family was treated at the time.
Get the Full Details
Writing the Entry
Each entry follows a standard format but it is not rigid. The field structure is: full legal name, date of birth, date of death, location of incident, employment status at time of death, source citations, and a short biographical paragraph if I can verify one. The biographical paragraph is where most people cut corners. I do not. If I cannot verify where someone went to school or what their job was outside the incident, I leave it out rather than guess. I had an entry once that ran on a community site using an unverified Ancestry tree. The family contacted me saying the person was not their relative and the dates were wrong. I took the entry down within the hour and flagged the source. The tone is matter-of-fact. These are not sensational stories. They are records. I write them the way I would want mine written — accurate, sourced, without flourish. The legacy part of what we do is just getting the facts right so the next person who looks this up does not waste their time.
Common Problems and What I Do About Them
The biggest issue is name changes and aliases. People in the system used nicknames. Frank became Francis. Rose became Rosa. I keep a lateral index file linking the common variants. It is a spreadsheet with three columns: known name, variant spellings, and confidence level. Confidence is either high, medium, or unverified. I publish only the high and medium entries and mark the unverified ones clearly. Another problem is the pre-1950 gap. The CTA was formed in 1947 from the merger of several private companies. Their records are scattered across private collections and some were lost in the 2006 fire at the Chicago Transit Authority's old records storage facility on Lake Street. I know because I was there when the news broke. Two of our regular researchers lost access to boxes they had been using for years. We reconstructed about forty entries from newspaper clippings and family submissions after that. Fare evasion deaths are a sensitive category. The CTA does not publish those individually and the families sometimes request anonymity. We honor those requests but we still record the date and general location. Anonymity is not the same as nonexistence and the family usually reaches out eventually when they see the entry exists without their loved one's name attached.
Where to Find the Current Archive
The main archive lives on a dedicated website that I maintain with a small team. We do not have a donor wall or a premium tier. The content is free and the domain cost is covered by a rotating subscription model among the researchers. There is no download link for the full database because the raw data includes family-contact information that should not be scraped. You can request specific entries through the contact form and I will send you what I have on that person. If you are looking for a specific case, start with the date and the line. The Blue Line incidents from 1995 onward are well documented because the cameras caught most of them and the NTSB reports are public. The Red Line events before 1980 are harder because the recording infrastructure was incomplete. I have a working theory about a cluster of incidents in the Hyde Park area around 1974 that I have never been able to fully verify. Three names, three dates, no coroner record matching any of them. It is possible they were processed through a suburban county. It is also possible they are not in our system at all.
What This Work Is Not
It is not ghost tourism. It is not macabre interest. These are people who died and whose families still deal with the paperwork and the memory. I have attended two memorials for people I only knew from documents. Both times I stood in the back and left before the service ended because I did not want to make it about me. The work is the records. The rest is secondary. There are limits to what we can do. We cannot recover records that were destroyed. We cannot force families to confirm details. We cannot verify every claim that comes through the contact form. About thirty percent of submissions are duplicate entries or clearly confused cases. I sort through them but I do not respond to every single one. A brief note saying the entry already exists is standard. Most people stop writing after that. If you have a name to add or a source you think we are missing, send it. I check everything before it goes live. That takes time but it is the only way this stays useful. A database full of errors is worse than no database at all. I would rather have four hundred verified entries than four thousand guesses.
A Note on the Term Tube City
The term itself comes from old union shorthand. The tunnels were called tubes in the early engineering documents and the workers kept using it even after the system expanded well beyond the original tube sections. It stuck in the culture. We use it because it is accurate to the vernacular and it distinguishes what we do from general transit history. There is a separate group that covers bus and streetcar fatalities. They do not cross over into our archive and we do not cross over into theirs. The boundaries are messy but we try to keep them clean. The obituaries we publish are not meant to be final. They are meant to be correct for the moment and improvable. Every time someone sends me a correction or a new source, I update the entry and log the change. The revision history is public on each page. You can see who changed what and when. That transparency is non-negotiable for me. I have seen too many community history projects become static and then become wrong by accident because nobody bothered to update them. I do not know how long this will keep going. The current team is small and the research load is growing. The pre-1960 cases are the ones most at risk of being lost permanently. If you have access to family photographs, letters, or anything that documents a person connected to the underground system, reach out. Paper degrades. Digital files get corrupted. The people who knew these names are getting older. The archive only works if more than two or three people are maintaining it.
