Working With Lancaster Obituary Records
I spend a lot of time digging through death notices and funeral home records for people trying to reconstruct family histories in the Lancaster area. It is not as straightforward as typing a name into a search box and getting clean results. The records exist, but they are scattered across multiple archives, digitized at different speeds, and often indexed incorrectly. Here is how I actually go about it. The Lancaster Online newspaper archive is the starting point for most researchers. They have a substantial collection of digitized obituaries dating back to the 1990s. The search interface lets you filter by name, date range, and publication date. But the index has gaps. Obituaries from certain periods were not scanned properly, and some names appear with OCR errors that make them nearly impossible to find through keyword search alone. I learned this the hard way when trying to locate an obituary for a woman named Katherina Hochstetler from the mid-1990s. The index listed her as Katharina Hochstehler, and no amount of search tweaking brought it up. I ended up browsing the microfilm version at the Lancaster History museum and found it on page B4 of the July 14, 1996 edition. The workaround for me became a two-step process: search the digital index first, and if nothing surfaces after twenty minutes, switch to the physical microfilm or request a scan through their records department. Beyond the daily newspaper, the Lancaster New Era has its own archive that overlaps with but is not identical to the online collection. Some obituaries run in both papers on the same day, sometimes with different wording or length. The Evening Farm Journal also published death notices for rural Lancaster County communities, and those are significantly underdigitized. If your ancestor lived outside the city proper, skipping that paper means missing entirely. I found a 1982 obituary for a man in Intercourse, Pennsylvania that only appeared in the Evening Farm Journal and was completely absent from both the Lancaster Online and Lancaster New Era databases.
Funeral home records are another source that most people overlook. Several families in Lancaster County use the same funeral homes across generations. The Eshleman Funeral Home, Burkhart Funeral Home, and Weaver Funeral Home all maintain their own files, some of which include photographs, program booklets, and extended family information that never makes it into the published obituary. These are not freely accessible online. You typically need to call, explain what you are looking for, and sometimes provide proof of relation. I spent about four hours on the phone with Weaver Funeral Home's records clerk before she agreed to send a scan of a 1978 funeral program for my research subject. She asked for a copy of the death certificate and a letter explaining the research purpose. Having those documents ready before you call saves significant time. Church records in Lancaster County can supplement what you find in print, especially for German-speaking communities where obituaries were sometimes published in Berichtsblatt or similar church periodicals rather than in secular newspapers. The Church of the Brethren, the Mennonite groups, and the Amish communities each maintain separate registries. Amish obituaries are particularly tricky because they often use Pennsylvania Dutch naming conventions and may not include middle names or exact dates of birth. A death notice for a Yoder from 2003 might list him as "Jacob Yoder, son of Hans and Mary, aged 67 years" without giving a specific birth date. Cross-referencing with church membership records or school district logs becomes necessary. One thing that trips up most people starting this work is assuming that the death certificate and the obituary will match. They rarely do. Death certificates are filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Health and contain legally verified information, but the data comes from the informant, usually a family member who may not know exact dates. I encountered a case where the death certificate listed a birth year of 1924, the obituary said he was 81 at death (which would place his birth around 1921), and the tombstone read 1922. The truth turned out to be 1921 based on a baptismal record I found at St. Joseph's Catholic Church. The discrepancy cost me about six weeks of confused searching before I stopped trusting any single document and started triangulating across sources.
If you are trying to access these records on a budget, the Lancaster History organization at 215 North President Street offers research visits by appointment. Their genealogy room has microfilm readers and a reference librarian who knows where the gaps are. Entry is free for members, but non-members pay a small daily fee. The Lancaster County Courthouse maintains vital records, but accessing records older than fifty years requires navigating their specific request procedure, which can take three to four weeks for a mail-in request. There are limitations to this kind of research that nobody warns you about. Digital obituary indexes are not searchable by image. If you know the exact date and page number, you can sometimes navigate directly to the scanned PDF, but you cannot do a full-text search inside the article itself unless the paper went through OCR after digitization. Many older obituaries from the 1980s and early 1990s were digitized as images only, meaning you have to physically scroll through pages to find the right one. This makes brute-force browsing the only option for those sections. I typically allocate two to three hours per week for this kind of manual lookup when dealing with pre-1995 records. Another bottleneck is that some obituaries were written by the funeral home staff rather than the family, which means they tend to be brief, formulaic, and light on personal detail. Longer, more personal obituaries usually come from family submissions. If you are looking for stories, anecdotes, or specific life details, prioritize the family-submitted versions and treat the standard funeral home notices as skeleton outlines rather than complete records.
Get the Full Details
For people who want a more organized approach without spending hours each week on manual searches, there are commercial genealogy databases that aggregate Lancaster County obituaries. Ancestry and Fold3 have some collections, but they are incomplete compared to the primary sources I described. The Lancaster County Genealogical Society also publishes periodic volumes that can save considerable time if you know the approximate year range you are searching. Their publications are available through the society's website or by mail order for about twenty dollars per volume.
