Researching Obituaries From the Washington Evening Journal
The Washington Evening Journal was a daily newspaper published in Olympia, Washington from 1900 to 1983. It covered local government, social events, and notably, obituaries that ran almost every day for nearly eight decades. If you are trying to trace family who lived in Thurston County or the greater Olympia area during that window, these papers are one of the most useful primary sources you will find. The most common starting point is the Library of Congress Chronicling America project. They have digitized the Washington Evening Journal in full, and you can search by keyword, name, or date range at no cost. The interface is not elegant, but it works. I recommend filtering by state (Washington) and title, then narrowing your date range to two or three years at a time rather than running a broad search across the entire publication run. The text recognition quality varies significantly by year. Issues from before 1920 tend to have poor OCR because the newsprint was darker and the type smaller. Running a name search that returns zero results does not mean the person is not in the paper. It means the scanned images resisted automated text extraction. Switch to browsing the actual page images and scan column by column. You will find entries that a keyword search missed entirely. Another angle worth pursuing is microfilm at the Thurston County Public Library or the Washington State Archives in Olympia. Both hold complete runs. The advantage of physical microfilm is image clarity. You can adjust contrast and zoom on individual articles in a way that digitized OCR cannot replicate. I spent an afternoon at the State Archives pulling reels from 1946 to 1948 looking for a great uncle who had moved away from the area and whose death was not reported in local papers he originally left behind. His obituary appeared in the Evening Journal under a slightly misspelled surname. The digital index had him listed as "Hendrickson" when his actual spelling was "Hendrikson." The misspelling only showed up when I was looking at the original page layout.
The obituary section in this paper follows a fairly consistent format. Short notices list the deceased person, age, residence, surviving family members, and funeral arrangements. Longer biographical sketches appear occasionally, especially for prominent residents or long-time community figures. These longer pieces sometimes include birthplace, immigration details, military service, and employer information that you will not find in any census record. A single obituary can anchor a missing generation link in your tree. I found a set of siblings I had never connected because their grandmother's obituary listed all of her children by name along with their current cities of residence. That one article resolved a branch that had been stuck for years. There are real limitations you should keep in mind. The coverage is geographically biased toward Olympia and its immediate surroundings. People who died in rural parts of Thurston County sometimes had their deaths reported in county weeklies like the Thurston County News or the Yelm Ledger instead. If someone is not turning up in the Evening Journal, check those papers next. The digitization is also incomplete for certain months. The Chronicle America project has gaps in the 1912 to 1915 range where coverage drops off intermittently. Cross-reference with the Washington State Archives finding aids to see which volumes are still unprocessed. Another practical issue is that obituaries do not always include a date of death. Sometimes they list the funeral date or the burial date instead. If you are searching by death date and coming up empty, back off by three to five days in either direction. Funeral notices often appeared one or two days after death, but family members sometimes requested delays for relatives traveling in from out of state.
If you need a systematic way to track down every mention, consider building a simple spreadsheet. Record the name found, date of publication, page number, full text transcription, and the source location. This becomes valuable when you return to a search months later and need to remember exactly where you looked. I have watched too many researchers hit a dead end because they could not recall whether they had already checked a particular microfilm reel or online database entry. For people interested in broader local history beyond their own families, the Evening Journal obituaries contain details about neighborhood businesses, church affiliations, volunteer organizations, and social clubs that are otherwise hard to reconstruct. The paper documented civic life thoroughly. Reading the obituary section chronologically over a single month will give you a fairly complete picture of who was active in Olympia at that time. The digitized copies are freely accessible through Chronicling America. No subscription is required. The microfilm collections at the Thurston County Public Library and the Washington State Archives are available to researchers on-site. Neither requires an appointment for casual browsing, though having a specific date range ready will save you time at the reading room.
Get the Full Details
