Where to Actually Find the Logs
The Logansport Pharos Tribune has been running obituaries since the late 1800s, and most people trying to research them hit the same wall within five minutes. They start at the newspaper's current website and scroll through the online archive, which only goes back maybe ten or fifteen years at most. Everything before that vanishes. I've watched people waste hours on that dead end. The actual records live in a few different places depending on what era you need. For obituaries from 1990 onward, the best starting point is the Internet Archive's microfilm digitization of the paper. The University of Notre Dame also holds a microform collection that covers the bulk of the 20th century. But here's the thing nobody tells you: the Pharos Tribune's own historical database, accessible through GenealogyBank, is probably the single most useful tool for this specific paper. It's not free, but it indexes the text of the obituaries themselves, which matters if you're trying to search by cause of death, military service, or a particular family member's name that doesn't show up in standard census records.
Uncovering The Past A Comprehensive Guide To Logansport Pharos Tribune Obituaries
I ran into a specific problem last year while tracking down an obituary for my great-uncle Harold. He died in 1978, which put him in that awkward gap where the physical newspaper was still being published but hadn't yet been digitized by any major platform. The Internet Archive had the microfilm, but searching it required knowing the exact date. His death certificate said he passed on a Tuesday in November, but the family couldn't agree on whether it was the 8th or the 15th. The workaround was straightforward once I figured it out. I called the Cass County Public Library directly and asked about their local history collection. They had the physical newspaper bound in monthly volumes. The librarian pulled the November 1978 bound issue and found the obituary on page 12. It turned out to be the 14th, not the 8th or 15th. The whole process took about twenty minutes on the phone and I could have done it in person, but the library was an hour away. If you're doing this research remotely, that phone call is worth making. Most county libraries in Indiana will let you ask a few questions before they send you a bill for a full copy request. There are some things about these obituaries that trip people up if they don't know them going in. The Pharos Tribune changed its obituary format significantly around 2003. Before that, the papers were shorter, more matter-of-fact, and rarely included the full list of surviving family members. After 2003, they expanded to include biographical sketches and detailed survivor lists. If you're searching across a century of records, expect the style and depth to shift dramatically mid-search. This isn't a bug. It's just how the paper evolved with its readership and with broader industry trends toward more detailed obituary content.
Another pitfall is assuming the date on the obituary matches the date of death. Funeral homes submit these to the paper with a turnaround time of two to four days. So an obituary printed on a Wednesday likely means the person died the prior Monday or Tuesday. When I was piecing together a timeline for a cousin's family history project, this gap cost us about three days of confused cross-referencing with cemetery records before we realized what was happening. For the really old stuff, before 1900, you're dealing with a different problem entirely. The Pharos Tribune was published during the Civil War and continued through the late 1800s, but many early issues are incomplete. The Indiana State Library in Indianapolis holds a significant collection of microfilmed newspapers from this region, including the Pharos Tribune. Their catalog lists the specific date ranges they have on microfilm. If you're researching a family line that goes back to the 1870s, you'll likely need to request a scan of specific pages rather than browsing the full run. The library charges per-page scanning fees, and the turnaround is usually five to seven business days. It's slow but reliable. If you want a more direct route for modern obituaries, the Logansport area has a community noticeboard system called PharosTribune.com. The paper migrated their obituary section there a few years ago. You can search by name and date range directly on the site. It's not a comprehensive archive, but for anything published in the last decade or so, it's the fastest way to pull up a record. The search function occasionally drops results if you type a middle initial wrong, so try both with and without it. I learned that the hard way when I searched for "Robert J. Smith" and got nothing, then searched "Robert Smith" and found three results, one of which was the right person.
Get the Full Details
The biggest limitation of using any single source for this research is that none of them cover everything. The online databases have gaps. The physical archives are incomplete. The library records are scattered across multiple institutions. The practical solution is to use at least two sources in parallel. Start with GenealogyBank or the newspaper's own archive, then cross-check with the Cass County Public Library holdings or the Indiana State Library microfilm collection. When the dates don't align, go back to the physical records. That's where the discrepancies usually resolve themselves. For someone just getting started, the most efficient approach is to begin with the person's known death date, search the online archive first for the obituary text, then use that text to pull the corresponding microfilm image for any details the index might have missed. Obituary indexes sometimes drop middle names or merge duplicate entries. The full image will show you what's actually printed. This workflow takes about forty-five minutes per obituary when you're working with records from the 1950s through the 1990s. Older records take longer because of the incomplete coverage and the need to coordinate with multiple libraries.
