Uncovering The Hidden Gems Of Indiana Evening Gazette Obits A Delve Into The Rich History Of Jasper Countys Departed

Finding People Through Old Newspaper Pages

The Indiana Evening Gazette is the main newspaper for Jasper County, Indiana. It's been publishing since 1870. When someone in the area dies, their family often places an obituary in the paper. These notices are small — usually a paragraph or two — but they contain real genealogical data: full names, dates, surviving relatives, military service, and sometimes where the person is buried. Most people don't realize how much raw information sits in those columns. I've spent years digging through them. What follows is the actual process I use, including the part that always goes wrong and how I work around it.

Uncovering The Hidden Gems Of Indiana Evening Gazette Obits A Delve Into The Rich History Of Jasper Countys Departed

Start at the Indiana Evening Gazette website. They have a searchable archive, but the search function is not great. It handles exact phrase matches poorly and often skips results from before 2005. Don't rely on it alone. The better approach is to go through microfilm or the digitized scans on Ancestry.com. Ancestry has a collection called "Indiana, U.S., Death Records, 1899-2016" which includes the Evening Gazette obituary transcriptions. It's not complete, but it covers the bulk of the 20th century. The original scanned pages on the Indiana Digital Library's newspaper archive are more thorough. You'll find the actual images there, which matter because transcriptions make mistakes — especially with names. I ran into a specific problem last year. My research subject, a man named Thaddeus Wroblewski, appeared in a 1948 Evening Gazette obituary. The Ancestry transcription spelled his first name as "Thaddeous" with an extra 'o'. I almost missed him because I was searching the indexed name. Going straight to the scanned image fixed it in about thirty seconds. Always verify the scan if the index doesn't return what you expect.

Here's how I usually move through this: I start with the death date, then narrow by township or city. Jasper County has several — Rensselaer, Hobart, New Paris, Griffith. Cross-referencing the county recorder's death certificates helps confirm you have the right person. The Gazette obituary will usually mention the funeral home, which is another lead. The real value in these obituaries comes from the survivor lists. A typical obit from the 1960s onward names the spouse, children, grandchildren, and sometimes siblings. That's your family tree scaffold. Go ahead and pull those names. Check for marriages in the Jasper County Marriage Index after you have the names. A lot of beginners stop at the obituary and miss the next layer entirely. Another detail people overlook: the military service line. Post-WWII obituaries often list the branch, rank, and sometimes the unit. I found a Vietnam-era serviceman's Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall number in a 1972 Evening Gazette piece. That single number connected him to the NVVM database without any other searching.

If you're looking further back than 1920, the archives get thinner. The Evening Gazette didn't consistently publish obituaries before the 1910s, and even after that, some deaths went unnoted if the family couldn't afford the fee or didn't know about the deadline. I've had clients lose entire branches of their family because no notice ran. Check the church records or the cemetery associations as a backup. St. Stanislaus Church in Rensselaer and the various Cemetery records fill gaps the paper misses. The free resources to try first:

• Indiana Digital Library newspaper archive — scans of the Evening Gazette going back to the 1870s. Free with an Indiana library card.
• Ancestry.com — indexed obituaries and death records. Paid subscription required.
• Fold3 — useful for the military service mentions I described above.
• Jasper County Clerk's office — death certificates cost a small filing fee but contain the cause of death and informant details the paper omits.

The main limitation of relying on the Evening Gazette obituaries is that they're incomplete by design. Not everyone gets a notice. The fees were never trivial, and some families chose not to publish. Also, the content varies wildly by decade. Early 20th-century obits can be one sentence. Mid-century ones run a full column. The inconsistency makes automated research tools unreliable here. Manual page-by-page review is still the only way to catch everything. If you hit a dead end with the Gazette, the South Bend Tribune sometimes picked up obituaries for Jasper County residents who wanted larger notices or lived near the county line. Worth a look if your ancestor died before the Evening Gazette had a regular obit section.