Working with Local Newspaper Obituaries From Upstate New York
The Binghamton area has a long publishing history, and the newspapers that served Broome County over the decades left behind substantial obituary records. Most people researching here hit the same wall within the first twenty minutes. The digitization is uneven, the indexing is shallow, and you end up bouncing between three different archives before anything makes sense. I've spent more time than I want to admit tracing the same families through the Binghamton Press, the Sun-Bulletin, and the later merger publications. The process is straightforward in theory. It's not straightforward in practice.
Uncovering The Rich History And Insights Of Binghamton Press Sun Obituaries
The main digitized collections you'll encounter are FamilySearch and Ancestry. FamilySearch holds the Press and Sun-Bulletin collection from 1866 to 1978, though the later years are mostly image-only with minimal transcription. Ancestry has some Press collections but they tend to be narrower in date range. Neither covers the full span of Binghamton-area publishing. The practical approach is to start with a death record or a Social Security death index entry to pin down an approximate date, then work backward into the newspaper databases. If someone died in March 1954, you look at the Press and Sun-Bulletin around mid-March of that year. Obituaries typically run one to three days after death, sometimes on the same day for quicker burial traditions common in that era. Here's where it gets messy. A lot of people assume the obituary is the final word on a death notice. It rarely is. The newspaper version is often edited down to a fraction of what the family submitted. Funeral homes kept detailed records, and in some cases those records survived the closure of the original firms. The Vroman's Lot Funeral Home archives, for example, contain papers that reference Press obituaries but include biographical details the newspaper never printed.
I ran into this specifically while researching a family line where the 1962 obituary listed a modest list of survivors. The funeral home file had the full sibling list including two who had died before publication, plus a military service record that the family had requested included but apparently the editor shortened. This happened more often than you'd expect. Newspaper editors in that era routinely trimmed "excess" detail. The sanitized version became the permanent record, and genealogists treated it as gospel. Another thing nobody warns you about: the transition from the Press to the Sun-Bulletin merger in 1981 created a gap period where some obituary formatting changed and earlier content wasn't always cross-referenced. If a family had published in the Press for generations and switched to the Sun-Bulletin, their later entries might be filed differently in whatever index exists. The indexing system for the merged publication is especially inconsistent. You'll find entries from 1983 and 1987 scattered across multiple reels with no clear organizational logic. If you're working with pre-1950 records, the New York State Library in Albany has microfilm copies of many Broome County papers. The library's newspaper collection is more complete than what's online, and the staff there can pull issues that FamilySearch hasn't bothered to scan. This cuts search time dramatically if you're doing serious work on multiple family lines.
Get the Full Details
The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas also holds some Binghamton Press material, though access requires a research visit or a paid copy request. It's not worth the trip unless you're already working through multiple other dead ends. What I've learned after doing this for years: always check the page adjacent to the obituary. Funeral home ads, death notices, and even classified sections from the same issue often contain information that the actual obituary omits. A simple $5 ad placement the week after a funeral might list a family address or church affiliation that fills gaps in the printed obituary. The biggest limitation you'll face is that a significant portion of the Press and Sun-Bulletin archive simply hasn't been digitized. Estimates put the online coverage at somewhere between forty and sixty percent depending on the decade. The 1970s through early 1990s are particularly sparse online. You'll need physical microfilm access or a research librarian to fill those gaps, and not all libraries will let you browse the microfilm without a specific date range to pull.
One workaround that actually works: contact the Binghamton Community History Collection at the Binghamton University Libraries. They hold original newspaper clippings and subject files that overlap with the Press and Sun-Bulletin run. Their clipping files sometimes include obituaries that were cut out and saved locally but never made it into the digitized archive. If you're trying to verify a death date for a relative who died between 1950 and 1970 and the newspaper record isn't turning up, try the New York State Department of Health death certificate index. It's not a newspaper record but it gives you an exact death date that narrows your newspaper search to a two-week window. Most people skip this step and waste hours scrolling through microfilm blindly. The obituaries themselves are useful but they're the starting point, not the endpoint. The real value comes from treating each one as a reference marker and then digging into whatever else survived alongside it. That's where the actual history lives.
