Reading Local Obituary Archives Properly
Most people treat old newspaper and TV obituaries like quick lookup tables. They search a name, grab the dates, and move on. That approach misses half of what those records actually contain. The formatting, the editorial choices, the cross-references between stories — these details matter if you're doing serious family history work. I spent years digging through WFMZ obituary archives and local PA newspaper records. Not because I had time to waste, but because a specific gap in my own family tree required it. What I learned about how to actually use these materials properly doesn't come from any guide the station publishes.
Uncovering The Past A Deep Dive Into Wfmz Obituaries
The process starts with understanding what WFMZ actually produces. WFMZ is a television station serving the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton market in eastern Pennsylvania. Their obituaries appear as video segments, sometimes as online articles, and occasionally get cross-posted to partner newspapers like the Express-Times or The Morning Call. Each format carries different information density. The video segments are the most common form. A reporter reads a prepared script over photos and cemetery footage. These run anywhere from 90 seconds to three minutes. The scripts typically include full name, age, city of residence, immediate surviving family, funeral home arrangements, and sometimes a brief life summary. What they don't include is usually more important: birthdates are often omitted entirely, military service is mentioned only occasionally, and parents' names rarely appear unless the deceased was young. The online written versions, when they exist, tend to be slightly more detailed. They sometimes include the full funeral service schedule, church location, and donor information for memorial contributions. But even the written versions are edited down from longer forms that families originally submitted. Newspaper funerals editors cut content freely. Names of distant relatives get dropped. Hobbies and career details disappear first during trimming.
The Actual Search Process
If you want to find a specific WFMZ obituary, start with the station's own website. WFMZ.com maintains an obituaries section that archives current and recent entries. Search by last name or full name. The archive goes back roughly five to seven years depending on the page structure at any given time. Older entries sometimes get moved to a secondary paginated listing that isn't always easy to navigate. For records beyond that window, you need to go to the newspaper partners. The Express-Times, published by Gannett, has an obituary archive that overlaps significantly with WFMZ coverage since both serve the same Lehigh Valley market. Search through their archive using name and date ranges. This typically pulls up printed obituaries that may have also aired on television, sometimes with additional details that weren't read on air. Cross-referencing between the TV broadcast version and the print version is where the real work happens. I found this out the hard way. My great-uncle died in 2018, and the WFMZ video segment listed his death date as a Thursday. The Express-Times print obituary, found three days later in my search, listed the same week but included a different time of death and the name of the hospital where he passed. Neither source was wrong. They were reporting different details from different preparation timelines. The hospital name only appeared in the written version because the family provided it in their submission form, not because the reporter knew it during the broadcast edit.
Get the Full Details
Pitfalls You Will Encounter
Name variations are the first major problem. People go by middle names, nicknames, or maiden names in their obituaries inconsistently. A man named Robert James Smith might appear as Bob Smith, Jimmy Smith, or Robert J. Smith across different publications. Search all variants. Use wildcards if the archive tool allows them. Spelling errors in older records are surprisingly common. Handwritten funeral home forms get transcribed incorrectly. Typographical errors in newsroom copyrooms persist if nobody catches them before publication. If a search returns zero results, try alternate spellings of both the first and last name. I once spent forty-five minutes looking for an ancestor whose last name was actually spelled with two L's, not one, because every database indexed it incorrectly. Date inconsistencies are another issue. Some obituaries list the date of death, some list the date of burial, and some list neither. Funeral homes submit what the family provides, and families sometimes don't know the exact date. Cross-reference with cemetery records, Social Security death indices, and church records when possible. The obituary date alone is rarely sufficient for accurate genealogical documentation.
The biggest limitation of WFMZ obituaries specifically is geographic scope. They cover the tri-county area of Lehigh, Northampton, and Carbon counties primarily. If your ancestor lived in surrounding areas like Berks, Monroe, or Bucks counties, they might not have been covered by WFMZ at all. In those cases, check the adjacent market stations: Reading Eagle, Times Leader, or Philadelphia outlets. This usually adds about twenty to thirty minutes to a standard search but prevents dead ends.
What to Do When You Find Something
Document everything immediately. Save screenshots of the online obituary, note the URL and access date, and record the broadcast date if it's a video-only entry. Web pages get removed or reorganized. WFMZ and its parent company Nexstar occasionally update their archive structure without warning, and older obituaries can disappear from public view during those transitions. I've lost access to three separate obituaries this way over four years of research. Use the obituary as a starting point, not an endpoint. It should generate follow-up research questions: which church was mentioned, what employer was listed, which cemetery was indicated, which funeral home handled arrangements. Each of those leads to additional records. Church records, employer archives, cemetery databases, and funeral home files all contain information that supplements or corrects what appears in the obituary itself. The Express-Times and Morning Call paper archives through the Library of Congress chronicling america project sometimes have digitized versions of older printed editions going back to the early twentieth century. These can fill gaps that television coverage simply never addressed. WFMZ didn't start regular obituary coverage until the 1990s at the earliest, and even then it was sporadic. Print records extend much further back for this market.
Genealogy work with local media obituaries is tedious but reliable when done systematically. The information is generally accurate because it comes directly from families, but it's incomplete by design. Budget extra time for cross-referencing and don't assume the first result you find is the complete record.
