Searching The Post-Gazette Obituary Archive
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been publishing obituaries since the late 1700s, though the modern format really took shape in the mid-twentieth century. Their online archive is searchable, but it is not straightforward. The site runs on a legacy platform that makes basic searches painfully slow and often returns results you have to manually filter through. When I started working with this archive a few years back, I was looking for a specific set of records from the 1960s. The search interface asks for a last name and optionally a date range, but it does not handle partial matches well. If your spelling is off by one letter, you get zero results and no suggestions. I wasted two weeks cross-referencing microfilm at the Huntington Library before I figured out the workaround. The trick is to search broadly and then filter manually. Use the full year or even a five-year window rather than pinning down exact dates. The database indexes obituaries by publication date, but the death date and publication date are rarely the same. People often die on a Tuesday and the obituary runs three days later. That gap matters if you are searching by death date rather than publication date.
What Makes This Archive Useful
Post-Gazette obituaries from the postwar era through the early 2000s tend to include more biographical detail than most regional papers. I am talking about employer names, military service branch, church affiliation, and surviving family members listed by relationship. A typical 1974 obituary for a Steelworker might run four paragraphs and contain more genealogical data than a modern one-page template that just says "beloved husband and father." That density is both the advantage and the problem. The information is there, but it is buried in prose that varies from writer to writer. Some obituaries list the deceased as "preceded in death by" their parents and spouse. Others skip the death-date notation entirely and just mention the funeral home. You have to read every line.
How To Actually Use The Search Tool
Here is the practical method. Go to the Post-Gazette obituary section. Enter the surname in the search box. Do not enter a first name unless you know it perfectly. Add a death year range that spans at least three years in either direction. Click search and wait. The page loads slowly because the database is querying decades of scanned text. Once results load, scroll past the ads. The actual obituaries appear as thumbnail previews with a brief snippet. Click through to read the full text. The scanned articles are in image format, so they are not selectable text unless the OCR worked properly on that particular issue. OCR quality varies wildly depending on the age of the original print and how well the scan held up. I encountered a case last year where a woman's obituary was filed under a maiden name that the database had somehow indexed under her married name. The search returned nothing until I tried both surnames and caught the discrepancy by checking the family members listed in the surviving kin section. That kind of error happens more often than the site acknowledges.
Get the Full Details
Limitations You Need To Know
The archive only goes back so far in digitized form. Pre-1990 obituaries are mostly available as scanned images, not text. That means you cannot do text-based searches within the obituary content itself. You are limited to the metadata fields: name, date, and sometimes location. If you need to find an obituary by a specific detail mentioned inside the text, such as a hometown or employer, you are out of luck unless you browse manually. The site also requires a subscription for full access. You can see the headlines and thumbnails without paying, but the actual obituary content is behind a paywall. I found that buying a monthly subscription for one month and using it intensively was more efficient than trying to access individual articles piecemeal. The cost is roughly twenty dollars for thirty days of unlimited access to the archive. An alternative is the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, which maintains its own local records index. It is smaller and less polished, but it is free and covers some overlap with Post-Gazette content. If you are doing serious research, use both. Relying on one source will leave gaps.
A Specific Edge Case
There was a search I ran for a man who died in 1988. His name appeared in the index as two different spellings across two separate publications. One listing had him as "Robert James Miller" and the other as "Bob J. Miller." The database treated them as different entries. I found the connection by noticing the funeral home listed was the same and the surviving children's names matched. The system does not de-duplicate entries the way you would expect. My workaround was to export the results to a spreadsheet and sort by funeral home and approximate age. That revealed the duplicate quickly. The Post-Gazette archive does not offer bulk export, so I had to copy entries by hand. It took about forty minutes for a set of twenty results. Scaling that to larger searches is not practical without writing a scraper, which the site's terms of service prohibit.
What You Will Actually Find
If you dig into this archive long enough, you will encounter the same patterns repeatedly. Steel industry workers dominate the mid-century obituaries. Immigrant surnames shift from Eastern European and Italian in the fifties and sixties to more diverse spellings in the eighties and nineties as the city's demographics changed. Military service is mentioned in nearly every obituary from the Korean War through the Gulf War era. The later entries become shorter and more standardized. By the 2010s, many obituaries are pre-written templates with fill-in-the-blank fields. The richness of detail drops off noticeably after 2005. If you are researching recent deaths, you may find more complete records on legacy.com or the newspaper's paid archive, but the earlier decades remain underserved by other sources. One thing the archive does not cover well is the obituaries of children and young adults. Those entries exist, but they are sparse and often lack the structured biographical data found in adult obituaries. The reasons are probably cultural and editorial, not technical. Still, if you are looking for that demographic, you will need to supplement with cemetery records and county health department documents.
