Getting Started With Scranton Times Obituaries
Obituaries in the Scranton Times are more than just death notices. They contain names, dates, relationships, migration patterns, and sometimes snippets of daily life that don't show up anywhere else. I've spent years digging through these archives for family history research and local genealogy projects. The trick isn't finding them — it's knowing how to use what's actually there. The Scranton Times Archive runs on a microfilm-to-digital scan system, and the OCR quality varies wildly depending on the age of the paper. Pre-1950 issues tend to have poor character recognition, especially in the smaller print blocks where obituaries live. Post-2000 digital versions are much cleaner but often strip away layout context that tells you which columns belong together. Here's how I approach a search when I need something specific:
I start with the online database using surname searches, then verify results against the original scan when possible. The database lets you filter by date range, publication section, and keyword. But the real problem is that many obituaries don't list full middle names or have alternate spellings — Smith could appear as Smyth, Schmidt, or Schmitt. I've learned to run variant searches for every common spelling variation of the surname I'm tracking. One edge case that burned me for months involved an ancestor listed as "Mary Elizabeth Kowalski" in the database but "M. E. Kowalsky" in the actual scanned paper. The OCR system had misread the cursive handwriting of the typesetter. The workaround was simple but time-consuming: I pulled the image record directly and used the zoom function to read the original formatting. That single correction unlocked three different family branches I'd been missing because they were filed under slightly different name variations across different years.
What You Can Actually Find In These Records
Standard obituary data includes the deceased's full name, age at death, date and place of death, surviving family members, funeral home, and burial location. But the useful stuff is usually tucked into the longer narratives — where someone mentions they came from Poland in 1912, or worked at the Lackawanna Steel Mill for forty years, or moved to Florida in their retirement. I keep a spreadsheet tracking occupation, immigration details, and family connections across multiple obituaries. One person's obituary might name their siblings. Those siblings' obituaries name their spouses. The spouses' obituaries might mention where they grew up. It's a chain, and each link can point you somewhere new. The social section sometimes carries brief life-sketch pieces about community figures that run a page or two long. These are goldmines because they include club memberships, church involvement, military service details, and even anecdotes about hobbies. A ten-year stint as president of the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America means something when you're trying to understand why your ancestor lived where they lived and who they knew.
Get the Full Details
Database Navigation And Search Techniques
The Scranton Times online archive charges for individual article downloads but offers free browsing of the index. I always do the free browse first to confirm a hit exists before spending money. The subscription tiers vary — monthly access runs around $15 to $25 depending on whether you need full image downloads or just metadata. Advanced search operators help narrow results significantly. Using quotes around exact phrases like "born in" or "survived by" catches articles that might otherwise get buried in broader matches. Date range filters should be set wide — I usually go plus or minus six months from my target because people get remembered late or early depending on when the family files the notice. There's also the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive at Penn State, which indexes Scranton Times content and sometimes links back to the original scans. It's free and useful as a secondary source. Cross-referencing between the two helps you catch articles the primary database might have miscategorized or dropped entirely.
Limitations And Where This Method Falls Short
The biggest limitation is coverage gaps. Not everyone who died in the Scranton area had an obituary printed in the Times. Rural communities sometimes used smaller weeklies, and families with limited means occasionally skipped the notice entirely or posted a minimal death card that ran for one day only. If your ancestor died in a hospital outside Scranton but lived in the city, check the surrounding county papers too. Another issue is the incomplete digitization schedule. Some years from the 1960s through 1980s are still on microfilm only and require an in-person visit or a paid archival retrieval request. The archive staff are generally helpful but response times for physical lookups run five to ten business days. Plan around that if you're working on a deadline. And frankly, the OCR errors are worse than I mentioned. Numbers get misread frequently — birth years, marriage dates, ages at death. Always verify critical data points against the actual image whenever possible. I've seen obituaries where "1923" got transcribed as "1928" and it threw off an entire decade of family timeline construction until I caught it by checking the original.
Putting It Together For Research
Start broad. Search the surname alone with a wide date range and scan the results. Then narrow by known details — a middle initial, a spouse's name, a city of residence. The more parameters you layer in, the tighter the results get, but don't layer too aggressively or you'll miss the very article you're looking for because of a typo in the database entry. Keep records of every search you run. Date, terms used, results found, and any dead ends. When you come back months later, you'll remember less than you think you will. I use a simple log in a notebook with columns for search date, keywords, result count, and which articles I pulled. The work is tedious but the returns are real. A single well-documented obituary can anchor an entire branch of a family tree and open doors to census records, military files, and immigration documents that reference the same people. The Scranton Times ran for well over a century, which means you have deep time coverage for a region that saw massive immigration waves and industrial boom-and-bust cycles. The papers captured all of it.
Accessing The Archive
The Scranton Times Archive is available through several platforms. The publisher's own site offers direct subscriptions. FamilySearch has some indexed content from this publication, though the coverage is selective. Ancestry.com occasionally licenses regional paper archives for specific markets, so check their newspaper collection for current availability. The Delaware County Historical Society also maintains a digital collection with some Scranton Times obituaries indexed and searchable. For anyone doing serious research in this area, I'd recommend starting with the free resources to map out what's available, then investing in a subscription only after you've confirmed the specific years and sections you need are actually digitized and searchable. The pain of discovering too late that your target decade is still on film is real.
