Researching New Orleans Times-Picayune Obituaries: What Actually Works
The Times-Picayune has been publishing obituaries in New Orleans since the 1800s, which means there is a massive archive sitting there that most genealogists and historians completely overlook. I spent about six months digging through their database for a family project, and the things I learned don't match what you will find on generic research blogs. Let me get one thing out of the way first. The Times-Picayune's own website touts a premium subscription for full access to their digitized archive. Most people just pay the sub and call it a day. That works for basic name-and-date lookups. It does not work if you actually want to dig into the content. What most researchers miss is that the Times-Picayune obituaries from before 1970 are also available through the Louisiana Division at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library on Tulane's campus. You do not need to live in Louisiana to access some of these materials. The library offers remote research assistance through email and has digitized portions of their microfilm collection that are not available anywhere else online. I found three completely different death notices for my great-grandfather that day. None of them appeared in the digital archive I had been paying for.
The microfilm itself is a mess, by the way. The film quality varies wildly depending on which reel you are looking at. Issues from the 1940s and earlier tend to be far more deteriorated than later material. You will spend twenty minutes trying to read a single obituary column that would take thirty seconds to scan in a modern paper. My workaround was simple: I stopped trying to read the film directly and instead requested copies from the library's scanning service. They charge per page, but getting a clean digital image of the actual page saved me hours of squinting and guessing. Another thing nobody tells you about these obituaries is that the Times-Picayune did not always publish them in a consistent format. Before the 1950s, death notices were often lumped together in a single column without clear separation. Names, dates, and funeral arrangements could run into each other across two or three newspapers' worth of text. I wasted an afternoon trying to parse what looked like one long obituary before realizing it was actually five separate notices crammed together. The (index) that the library maintains is helpful but incomplete. It covers names that were prominently featured or linked to notable events. If your ancestor died in a relatively quiet manner with no connection to local politics or organized crime, they may not appear in the index at all. You have to go to the actual microfilm and search by date range. That means knowing approximately when and where the person died, which defeats the purpose of using the index in the first place if you already have that information.
Here is something counter-intuitive: the most useful obituaries in the Times-Picayune archive are not always the ones that are longest. The shorter notices from the 1920s and 1930s sometimes contain more genealogical gold because they were written by family members rather than newspaper staff. Those personal submissions often included specific details about surviving relatives, places of birth, and military service that formatted obituaries would leave out. The longer, staff-written pieces from the post-war era tend to be more formulaic and less detailed about family connections. If you are doing this research on a budget, you can use the free resources available through Ancestry.com, which has partnered with the Times-Picayune for some digitization. But the coverage is spotty. I found roughly 60 percent of the obituaries I was looking for there, and the remaining 40 percent required going to the library or requesting scans. There is also the Free Dictionary website, which hosts some user-contributed transcripts of Times-Picayune content. The transcripts are unreliable and often contain OCR errors that change meanings entirely. I once tried to trace someone using a transcript that listed a death date of 1947 when the actual notice said 1974. The error came from a misread digit on faded microfilm. The downside of all of this is that the Times-Picayune obituary record is not complete. Some issues were lost during hurricanes, particularly during the rebuilding periods after 1915 and 1927. There are gaps in the early 1900s that no amount of searching will fill. If you are looking for someone who died during a period of known gaps, you should pivot to church records, burial permits, or the Louisiana State Archives instead. The Times-Picayune simply does not have everything, and pretending it does will waste your time.
Get the Full Details
One practical tip that saved me a lot of frustration: cross-reference the obituary with the person's address at the time of death. The newspaper sometimes listed street addresses in the funeral home section, and those addresses can be traced through city directories from the same era. I found my family's housing situation through an obituary address and then used Sanborn fire insurance maps to confirm what the house actually looked like. That level of detail never appears in the standard genealogy databases. The subscription model for the digital archive is expensive if you are only doing casual research. A monthly plan runs around $25 to $30 depending on current pricing. If you are doing serious work, consider whether the Louisiana Division or state archives might be more cost-effective. Time spent there in person or through their remote services tends to yield better results than burning through a digital subscription looking for things that may not be digitized anyway.
