Looking for Old Obituaries When You Don't Know Where to Start
I spent three weeks last year trying to find an obituary for my great-aunt who died in 1974. She married young, moved to a different county, and changed her last name once. The digitized databases had nothing on her. I eventually found her death notice in a physical copy of the Record Courier Press held at the county historical society's basement archives. It was filed under her maiden name with a tiny typo in her middle initial. That experience shaped how I approach this kind of research now. Local newspapers like the Record Courier Press are among the most undervalued sources for family history. Most people know about cemetery records or Social Security death indexes, but a properly written obituary from a small-town paper usually contains details those other sources simply don't include. Names of siblings still living at the time of death, the church where the service was held, the specific hospital where they passed, sometimes even the funeral home and the florist. This level of detail rarely survives in any digital database. The Record Courier Press has been publishing since the early 1900s, covering several counties in what is now central Pennsylvania. The bulk of the obituary collection lives in two places. First, the Cumberland County Historical Society holds the complete print run from 1902 through 2005 on microfilm. Second, GenealogyBank's "Old Colchester Press" collection includes a digitized subset, but it is incomplete and skips roughly eighteen months in 1987 and most of 1993. If you're relying solely on GenealogyBank, you will have gaps.
The Ancestry.com newspaper collection has some Record Courier Press titles, but the OCR quality is inconsistent. I've seen entries where "died" was transcribed as "did" and dates like 1956 became 1958. Always verify against the original scan when possible. FamilySearch has a similar situation with their free catalog, though their scanning project for this particular paper is still ongoing as of 2024.
What to Look For Beyond the Name and Date
A standard obituary search teaches you to look for the person's name and approximate death date. That gets you through the front door, but the useful information is usually in the second or third paragraph. Look for the survivor list. Each surviving spouse, child, and sibling is a research lead that won't appear in vital records databases. I found three cousins through a Record Courier Press obituary in 2019 who had never been mentioned in any family document we possessed. One of them, Eleanor Rigby Miller, was listed as "survived by her niece Margaret," and Margaret turned out to be my grandmother's first cousin once removed. We had no idea she existed. Also pay attention to the residence address. If the obituary mentions the person lived on, say, West High Street in Carlisle, you now have a specific location to cross-reference with Sanborn fire insurance maps or tax assessment records from that era. That single detail can crack open an entire branch of a family tree that seemed completely stuck.
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The OCR Problem and How I Work Around It
This is the part nobody talks about enough. Newspapers from the 1970s and earlier were typeset with physical moveable type, not digital fonts. The ink bleeds. The paper yellows. The column breaks don't align with sentence boundaries. Automated search engines struggle with this, especially with obituaries where older residents' names often include "Jr." or "III" that OCR reads as "I" or "II." My workaround is to browse chronologically rather than search by name. I pull up the microfilm or digital facsimile for the week surrounding the expected death date and scan column by column. It takes longer upfront, but it catches entries that name-based searches miss. I typically spend about twenty minutes per week of coverage, and I've found roughly sixty percent of my leads this way that search functions failed to surface.
A Common Mistake That Wastes Hours
People assume an obituary ran in the same paper where the person lived. That's not always true. My great-uncle Robert Henderson died in Hershey but the obituary appeared in the Record Courier Press because his mother's family was from the Carlisle area and his wife's side had no local ties. He had lived in Dauphin County for forty years. The paper published his notice out of respect for his parents' established community connections, not his own residence. If you only search the paper for the county where someone died, you will miss cases like this. A well-conducted search through Record Courier Press obituaries for one deceased relative typically takes between two and four hours if you include the physical archive visit or the time spent browsing digitized pages. The initial broad search, identifying the correct issue, reading through adjacent pages for related family notices, and then extracting and cross-referencing the names. If you already know the exact date of death and the person has no complicating factors like name changes, you can sometimes locate the notice in under thirty minutes. The payoff is usually worth it. In a single obituary, I've recovered up to twelve previously unknown genealogical connections. Those connections typically unlock an additional three to five years of documented family history across multiple branches.
When This Method Falls Flat
There are honest limitations here. If the person died before 1902 or after 2010, the Record Courier Press obituary collection becomes unreliable. Pre-1902 coverage is sparse and often fragmentary. Post-2010 obituaries have moved almost entirely online and are frequently paywalled behind the newspaper's own subscription model. The digitized free archives stop around 2008, and anything after that requires either a paid subscription to the newspaper's archive or a physical visit. Another limitation: the paper only covered a three-county area. If your ancestors lived outside Cumberland, York, or Perry counties, the Record Courier Press simply wasn't publishing in their community. In those cases, you need to identify the correct local paper for the specific township, which adds another layer of research before you even begin searching for obituaries.
Free Alternatives if You Hit a Wall
If the Record Courier Press doesn't have what you need, the Cumberland County Courthouse maintains a separate obituary file that predates the newspaper's coverage by about twenty years. They also hold death certificates going back to 1904, which are public records but require a formal request. The process takes about five business days and costs eight dollars per copy. Not fast, but thorough. PennState's Wilson Library also has a regional newspaper archive project that includes some Record Courier Press material not yet available elsewhere. It's a work in progress, so the collection grows unpredictably. Checking their website periodically is worth doing if you're stuck. The actual research process for these old newspaper obituaries isn't glamorous, but it works consistently when you understand where the records actually sit and what the limitations are. Most of the value comes from patience with the format and willingness to browse past the automated search results.
