How to Research Obituaries for a Peru, Indiana Ancestor
Peru, Indiana sits in Miami County, about an hour northwest of Indianapolis. The obituary records there are scattered across a few different repositories, and if you don't know where to look, you can easily spend three hours with nothing to show for it. I spent exactly that long trying to track down information about someone in the Eikenberry line a few years back. Here's what I learned. The first place most people check is newspapers.com or ancestry's newspaper collection. Both have Peru resources, but the indexing is uneven. I found a decent run of the Peru Daily Star obituaries going back to the 1950s, but entries before that are hit or miss. The key problem is that older papers weren't microfilmed comprehensively. Some volumes just don't exist in digitized form. You'll hit a wall around the 1930s or earlier depending on which database you're using. The workaround is to bypass the big databases entirely and go direct. The Miami County Historical Society has a physical file of clippings that aren't available online. They also have access to papers on microfilm that aren't in any digital collection. If you live anywhere near Peru, go in person. Otherwise, call them and ask about a copy request. It costs about fifty cents per page and they usually respond within a week. This approach found me an obituary that wasn't indexed anywhere else.
The Miami Countycourthouse is another source, though less obvious. Death certificates and some funeral home records are kept there. A death certificate will give you exact dates, parents' names, and the informant's relationship. That informant is often a spouse or child, which opens up the next generation of your research. You need a legitimate interest to request these in Indiana. Having a genealogy connection documented is enough, but having the person's full name and approximate date of death makes it faster. Here's something people miss: the obituary itself is secondary. The real value is in the survival information. Who lived, who died young, which children moved where. Those details connect you to census records, military drafts, and land transfers. The Eikenberry family I was researching had multiple branches that split between Indiana and Ohio around 1900. Without tracking the obituary mentions of relocated siblings, I would have lost half the line. Local churches are also worth checking. If the family was Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian, their membership records sometimes survive in county archives or at the denominational headquarters. These aren't obituaries, but they fill gaps that newspapers don't cover. A baptism record might confirm a birth year that the census got wrong, which is common with older Indiana records.
One edge case I ran into: the name Eikenberry appears in some indexes as Kinney or even Keeney. These are likely transcription errors, but they can send you down the wrong path. When I was searching Ancestry's database, I kept finding unrelated Kinney families. Switching my search to include phonetic variations and looking at the actual scanned images instead of relying on indexed names saved me weeks. The original handwriting usually makes it clear which spelling is correct, but OCR tools and volunteer transcribers make mistakes regularly. If you're doing this research yourself, start with what you know and work backward. Don't try to reconstruct an entire family tree in one session. Pick one person, find their obituary, extract every name mentioned, then research each of those names individually. The process is slower but far more reliable than jumping between sources hoping things connect. The Peru Public Library has a local history section with some county histories and cemetery transcriptions. It's small but specific. They won't have everything, but they have things that aren't online. I found a cemetery transcription there that listed plot locations for several Eikenberry family members, which confirmed burial sites that weren't in any digital record.
Get the Full Details
For obituaries after 1970, the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis has a larger newspaper microfilm collection. If you can't get to the Miami County Historical Society, that's your backup. The State Library is also where you'd look for the Indiana State Department of Health death records if you need official documentation rather than newspaper notices. The biggest limitation with this approach is time. Even with the right sources, a thorough obituary research session for one person typically takes two to four hours. You're reading through fragmented records, cross-referencing names, and dealing with inconsistent indexing. But the return on investment is significant. A single well-sourced obituary can resolve three or four dead ends in a family tree. If the Eikenberry line you're researching goes back past 1900 in Miami County, expect to find land records and probate files alongside the obituaries. The county recorder's office and the probate court maintain those, and they often mention the same family connections that obituaries do. Using all three source types together gives you a much clearer picture than any single record type alone.
