Getting Your Hands On The Rapid City Journal Archive
The Rapid City Journal has been publishing obituaries in western South Dakota for well over a century, and the records are still mostly paper-based at the local level. You can search online now, but it's worth knowing where the gaps are before you waste an afternoon. I spent about three years tracking down family genealogy through their archive system, and most people hit the same walls. Start with the online subscription through the newspaper's own site. They've digitized obituaries going back to roughly 1997, sometimes earlier depending on the microfilm scanning schedule. The interface is decent but slow if you're pulling more than five or six results at once. Use the date-range filter instead of keyword search when you know roughly when someone died. Keyword search on names alone returns too many false positives, especially for common surnames like Anderson or Nelson. The real problem starts with anything before 1997. Those records live on microfilm at the Rapid City Public Library's local history room on the ground floor of the main branch downtown. You need a library card to access the reader-printer. Walk-in users can get one same-day for free. Bring a USB drive or plan to print. The microfilm is organized by date, not alphabetically. That means you have to know approximately when the person died or work backward from known dates. I once spent two full days looking for an obituary from 1963 because I had the wrong year and didn't realize it until I'd already watched every reel between March and November.
There's a secondary source that nobody talks about much. The Pennington County clerk's office keeps death certificates and some funeral home records that predate the Journal's coverage. These aren't digitized and they don't cross-reference each other. If you're hitting dead ends in the newspaper archive, a visit to 500 Kansas Street usually fills in the gaps. You'll need the full legal name and the date of death at minimum. Copies cost $5 per certificate. One thing the online system gets wrong consistently is name indexing. Maiden names, nicknames, and hyphenated surnames are rarely captured properly in the database metadata. If someone went by a middle name or a nickname listed in the obituary body text but not in the title field, the search will skip them entirely. The workaround is to pull the actual scanned page by date and read straight through the issue. That takes longer upfront but catches entries that the index misses. I count maybe one in six searches on the digital system as incomplete on a first pass. Another pitfall is assuming every obituary from Rapid City was published in the Journal. Some families chose local papers in Kittelman or Box Elder, or used funeral home websites exclusively starting around 2008. The Journal was the dominant paper but not the only one. If your ancestor died after 2005 and there's nothing in the archive, check the funeral home directly. Many of them still publish copies of the full obituary and can email or mail a PDF even decades later.
The library microfilm collection is the most complete resource but the viewing equipment is aging. The reader-printers sometimes produce low-contrast copies that make handwriting in adjacent columns unreadable. I keep a digital camera with macro capability on hand now and photograph the page directly from the screen. That preserves the original resolution better than the built-in printer, which tends to compress and blur fine type from the 1940s era films. The library staff doesn't advertise this option. Just ask. If you're researching a specific family line, start with the last ten years online and work backward from there. It's faster to confirm the modern records match what you expect before committing time to the microfilm room. The subscription to access the full archive runs about $30 a month if you pay individually. Many county library systems offer free passes that include newspaper archive access, so check with the South Dakota State Library first before paying anything.
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