Why Obituaries Are Actually Useful For Local History
Most people think obituaries are just brief death notices. They are not. A properly written obituary from the late 1800s or early 1900s can contain birth dates, immigration records, military service, church membership, surviving family, and even cause of death. That is a lot of genealogical data packed into three hundred words. Manitowoc, Wisconsin has a unusually dense collection of these records. The city sits on Lake Michigan and was one of the larger ports in the state during the lumber and shipping boom. That means a lot of people arrived, lived, died, and were documented between 1850 and 1940. The obituaries from that period are scattered across several newspapers, microfilm collections, and some digitized indexes.
Uncovering The Faces Of Manitowoc A Deep Dive Into The Citys Rich History Through Obituaries
I started working with these records around 2012. The first thing I learned is that the standard newspaper indexes are incomplete. The Manitowoc Herald and the Manitowoc County Courier kept separate indexes, and neither one covers every single obituary. There are gaps, especially during the 1918 flu pandemic when the papers ran out of space and printed death announcements in condensed blocks instead of individual notices. The main collections to check are the Wisconsin State Historical Society archives, the Manitowoc Public Library local history room, and the digitized newspapers on Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank. The library on 14th Street still holds the original microfilm for the Herald going back to 1851. Some of the reels are in poor condition. The paper has become brittle and the ink fades on copies made from degraded originals. I have worked around this by requesting digital scans from the library rather than reading the microfilm directly. It takes longer, but you get a cleaner image and you are not fighting with a machine that jumps frames randomly. One problem I ran into repeatedly is the variation in how surnames were recorded. A German immigrant might appear as Mueller in one obituary and Muller in another. Sometimes the same person is listed under a nickname or a misspelling. I started keeping a master spreadsheet with every known spelling variation, including phonetic matches, and cross-referencing by middle name or wife's name. This cut down my search time significantly. Instead of searching for one name and finding nothing, I could run five variations at once and pull relevant results.
Another thing most beginners miss is that obituaries are not always filed under the deceased person's last name. Children sometimes had their notices filed under the mother's name if she was the surviving parent listed first. Widows were occasionally indexed under their husband's surname rather than their own. If you are looking for a woman who died in 1923 and her obituary mentions her husband died in 1910, check the husband's surname in the index first. That habit alone saves hours of dead searches. The formatting of these records changed over time. Pre-1900 obituaries tend to be short, often just a paragraph or two. They list the person's age, family members, and sometimes the church. After 1900 they get longer and more detailed, with lists of surviving siblings, children, grandchildren, and even the name of the funeral home. The length and detail can tell you something about the person's social standing without you having to read between the lines. You will also find that some obituaries include the name of the doctor, the cemetery section, and the pastor who performed the service. Those details are useful for locating actual burial records and church documents. The Calvary Cemetery and St. Michael's Cemetery both have interment records that cross-reference with the newspaper notices. I found a case where an obituary said the person was buried at Calvary but the cemetery records showed a different plot. The discrepancy turned out to be because the person had been moved from an original family plot after a flood in 1903. The obituary writer assumed the original location and never corrected it. That kind of mistake is common enough that you should always verify cemetery records separately.
Get the Full Details
If you are doing this research seriously, you will want to learn how to read old handwriting on the original newspaper copies. Many of the microfilm scans are clear, but some are not. Knowing basic paleography helps. Start with the simple prints from the 1880s and work up to the gothic typefaces and cursive addresses that show up in later years. The Manitowoc Public Library sometimes hosts sessions on reading old documents. They are not frequent, but they are worth attending if you can make it. There are tools that can help. Transcriber software and optical character recognition programs work reasonably well on the clearer scans, but they fail on faded or damaged pages. I use a combination of manual transcription and OCR, checking the OCR output against the original image for accuracy. This usually catches about 95 percent of errors. The remaining 5 percent tend to be names or dates, which matters if you are building a family tree. One limitation of this approach is that it relies on the obituary actually being published. Not everyone got one. Impoverished residents, people who died alone, and those from marginalized communities often had no formal notice. If you are researching a specific lineage and hit a wall around 1910 to 1920, check city directory listings, census records, and death certificates. Obituaries alone will not fill every gap.
The death certificate is actually the more reliable document for dates and cause of death. The obituary is better for social context and family connections. Use both together. The certificates are held by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and can be requested by direct descendants. Non-relatives usually cannot access them unless a court order is involved. This is a legal restriction that applies statewide and it is enforced. Another thing to keep in mind is that some obituaries were reprinted in neighboring papers. The same notice might appear in the Sheboygan Press or the Green Bay Press-Gazette if the person had family there. Checking those papers can give you additional details that the Manitowoc publications omitted. I found one obituary that mentioned a deceased man served in the Civil War. The Manitowoc version did not include his regiment. The Sheboygan reprint did, and that single line connected me to military pension records that would have taken weeks to find otherwise. The process is straightforward but tedious. You identify the person, search the available indexes, pull the original obituary, transcribe it carefully, verify the details against other records, and then move to the next name. A single obituary search and verification cycle usually takes between 20 and 45 minutes depending on how much additional documentation you need to cross-check. A full day of focused work can yield anywhere from 10 to 25 complete records if you are efficient and the sources are in good shape.
Keep your sources cited. Write down exactly where you found each piece of information, including the newspaper name, date, page number, and whether you viewed it on microfilm or digitally. Future researchers, including yourself, will thank you when you come back to this work six months later and cannot remember which reel contained the entry you need. There is no single database that has everything. The closest thing is the digitized collection from the Wisconsin Historical Society, but even that has gaps. Supplement it with the library holdings, the cemetery records, and the neighboring newspaper archives. The more sources you check, the more complete your picture becomes. Obituaries are one piece of a larger puzzle, but they are one of the more accessible pieces and they tend to connect to everything else if you know how to use them.
