Accessing Local Newspaper Archives: A Practical Guide to Des Moines Register Obituaries
The Des Moines Register has been publishing obituaries since 1860, making their archive a dense resource for Midwestern genealogy research. I spent three weeks last fall trying to piece together a family line through these records, and let me tell you - it is not as straightforward as people assume. The digital interface changes frequently, paywalls shift, and many early records exist only in scanned microfilm or poorly indexed PDFs. Most researchers start at desmoinesregister.com and click the obituary section. That gets you current listings from the past few years. But the real value sits in the digital archive behind a subscription, typically $7.99 monthly or $49.99 annually for full access. I found the annual option worth it if you are doing serious family history work spanning multiple decades. The archive search lets you filter by date range, location, and name. You can also search by newspaper section - some important biographical details ended up in feature sections rather than strict obituary listings, especially before 1985. I stumbled across a 1942 obituary for my great-uncle that mentioned his migration from Iowa to California during the war, and that detail never appeared in census records or family bibles.
Common Problems and Workarounds
The biggest frustration involves the OCR quality on older scans. A lot of records from the 1920s through 1950s were digitized using early optical recognition software, which means common surnames like Johnson or Smith frequently come back as J0hnson or Sm1th due to character misreads. I learned to search with wildcards and phonetic variations when standard queries returned zero results. Another issue: many obituaries list only a first name or nickname for surviving family members. Standard genealogy software will flag these as "data incomplete," but cross-referencing multiple obituaries from the same family cluster often reveals the full names. My workaround involved creating a spreadsheet tracking all mentions of a particular surname across different obituary dates, then manually connecting the dots. The Des Moines Public Library also maintains physical microfilm collections dating back to the early 1900s. If you live in Polk County, visiting in person bypasses paywalls entirely. The reference desk staff are knowledgeable but slow - expect to spend 20 minutes explaining what you need before they start digging. Bring your own magnifying glass; the library issue outs pretty quickly.
What Most People Miss
Obituaries before 1970 often include brief biographical sketches that mention military service, church affiliations, and organizational memberships. These details do not always transfer to genealogy databases because transcriptionists focus on dates and names. I found three separate obituaries that mentioned my ancestors served in the 35th Infantry Division during World War II - information completely absent from Ancestry.com member trees at the time. There is also a practice of running "in memoriam" sections alongside obituaries. These shorter notices sometimes list death dates for older relatives who died years or decades earlier, providing bridge information between census records. I used this technique to fill a 12-year gap in my grandmother's family line that standard searches could not resolve.
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Alternative Resources When the Archive Fails
If the Register's digital system seems unreliable (and it does), try the Iowa Digital Library at iowadigitallibrary.org. They have partnered with county historical societies to host newspaper collections that sometimes include Register content not properly indexed in the commercial archive. The interface is clunky, but the content overlaps significantly. The State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines holds bound volumes of early Register issues. They do not offer photocopying services for obituaries under five minutes old, but you can view original pages on-site. I copied roughly 40 obituaries this way during one visit, which would have cost over $150 through the digital subscription's pay-per-article model. For very old records (pre-1920), check if your county maintained separate death registrations that referenced local newspaper announcements. Polk County health records from the 1910s through 1930s are publicly accessible at the county recorder's office, and several entries I examined included references to "public notice published per legal requirement" - essentially early obituary citations that sometimes pointed to Register coverage now lost to digitization errors.
