Why I Waste Time On Local Obituaries
I spend a lot of Saturdays scrolling through the Montgomery County Courier obituary section from the 1980s and 1990s. Not because it's romantic, but because genealogy work in central Indiana rarely gives you much to go on. Census records list names and ages. Birth certificates are guarded. Death certificates are useful but usually short. The obituary is often the only place where someone's parents, siblings, churches, and neighbors all appear in one document. The process is not as simple as finding the paper and reading it. Here's what actually happens when you dig into Crawfordsville obituaries and try to pull useful information from them. The primary source is the Martinsville Tribune archive and the Crawfordsville Daily Journal through the Indiana State Library's Hoosier Genealogy Miscellany collection. You can also hit Newspapers.com for full-text searchable runs, though coverage gets spotty before 1975. The local library holds physical microfilm of the earlier papers, and I have found on two separate occasions that a name or church affiliation appeared in the microfilm version that the digitized text version missed because OCR garbage-collected the column layout.
The real difficulty is that many Crawfordsville obituaries from the 1940s through the 1960s were published in abbreviated form. A typical one might run two inches and list: survived by wife, two children, one brother. That's it. No funeral home. No cemetery. No service time. The workaround I use is to take the date of the obit and search the Montgomery County Court probate records held at the Courthouse Annex on West South Street. The probate filing usually lands within three to five days after death and contains the actual death certificate, the bond amount, and the appointed executor. That executor is typically a child or sibling who also appears in the obit, which ties the two records together cleanly. Another thing nobody tells you: the Wabash Valley and the Montgomery County Fair programs sometimes ran small bereavement notices alongside agricultural society events that never made it into digitized search indexes. I found my third great-uncle's death notice in a 1952 fair program while looking for something completely unrelated. The lesson is that if standard obituary searches come up empty, check event calendars and church bulletins from the same month.
What To Expect When You Actually Dig In
You will find contradictions. The 1910 census lists a birth year. The obituary from 1943 says the person was 68, which would make the birth year 175 years off if read literally, or more likely 1875 if you assume a misread. This is normal. I once spent an entire afternoon chasing a family line because the obituary printed a wrong middle initial and the funeral home card on file at McClannahan Funeral Home had the correct one, but the death certificate at the county health department had yet another spelling. The resolution came from the social security index, which is available through Ancestry, confirming the correct middle initial that linked back to a military draft card. The cemetery records are the next logical step. Maplewood Cemetery and Greenlawn Cemetery in Crawfordsville have been partially transcribed, but the transcriptions contain errors. I personally encountered a plot recorded as "Johnson, William, 1902" when the headstone clearly read "Jackson." The transcriptionist had misread an eroded stone. Always verify against the actual marker or a photo of it. The Indiana Cemetery Record Project has some photographs but coverage is incomplete for Montgomery County. If you are researching a family member who died before 1950, expect to spend roughly forty-five minutes per obituary hunt if you work digitally, and roughly two to three hours if you visit the Montgomery County Public Library on South Meridian Street to pull the physical volumes. The reference librarian on site, whose name I won't guess because it changes, is competent but will not do the research for you. They will show you how to use the microfilm reader, which takes about ten minutes of fumbling before it clicks.
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Common Mistakes That Waste Hours
The first mistake is assuming the obituary is accurate about the place of death. Many rural residents died at the St. Vincent Crawfordsville Hospital or in Indianapolis and the obituary simply said "died at home" because that is where they lived. Cross-reference with hospital records if you need the actual location. Those records are not publicly accessible online and require a formal request to the hospital's records department, which typically takes six to eight weeks to respond. The second mistake is ignoring the "in lieu of flowers" donation line. That line often names a specific church or a mutual aid society. In Crawfordsville, I have found that the Odd Fellows and Woodmen of the World lodge records from the early twentieth century contain membership cards that list next of kin, birth dates, and sometimes even a portrait photograph. These lodge records are held at the Indiana Grand Lodge archives in Indianapolis, not at the local level. You have to mail a request or visit in person. The third mistake is assuming every death has an obituary. During the 1918 flu pandemic, many deaths went unreported in the paper or were listed only in a community bulletin. The Montgomery County Health Department maintains a digitized death index for 1918 that you can access through the Indiana State Archives, but the image quality is poor and requires patience to read.
A Practical Workflow
Start with the date of death if you know it. Search the Crawfordsville Daily Journal archive for that date range. Pull the obituary. Note every name mentioned. Look up those names in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses to confirm relationships. Check Maplewood and Greenlawn cemetery transcriptions for burial location. Search probate records at the county courthouse if available through the Indiana Portal to Online Records ( IndianaPor ) or by visiting in person. Verify any hospital record requests separately. Check Odd Fellows and church archives if the obituary mentions a lodge or congregation. Fill in gaps with city directory listings from the library microfilm, which give you street addresses and occupations year by year. Using this method on a single unknown ancestor in my own research cut the time required from an estimated three-week hunt down to about four days once I stopped trying to force matches from incomplete obituary text and started using the probate and cemetery cross-reference as my primary anchor points. Most of the people I have researched this way end up with a complete chain from birth to burial within a few Saturdays of work. Some do not, and for those cases there is no shortcut past visiting the relevant physical archive in person. The best resource I have found for starting is the Indiana State Library's Genealogy Center, which has a dedicated microfiche collection of Indiana newspapers on-site. The Montgomery County Public Library has a smaller but sufficient local collection. Neither charges fees for basic access. Anything beyond that, like requesting certified copies of death certificates or digging into hospital files, costs money and time that you should budget for before you start.
