Starting With Local Newspaper Archives
Aberdeen, South Dakota has been around since the late 1800s, so finding obituaries there is mostly a matter of knowing where the records live and which databases actually have decent coverage. The main paper is the Aberdeen Daily News, which started publication in the 1880s. Most people begin their research by searching the newspaper archive databases, but that alone won't get you very far. I'll explain what actually works. When you're working through Uncovering The Rich History Of Aberdeen SD A Journey Through Local Obits, the first step is getting access to the actual newspaper records. Ancestry has the Aberdeen News collection digitized, which covers a solid range of years. FamilySearch also has some microfilm copies available for free. The South Dakota State Historical Society maintains a database of digitized newspapers that includes Aberdeen titles. I tend to start with the South Dakota portal because it sometimes has issues that the commercial databases missed, then cross-check with Ancestry for convenience. Here's a specific problem I ran into a while back. I was looking at an obituary from around 1902 that mentioned a person's middle initial but not their full middle name. The digital image of the newspaper page had a crease running right through the column where that name appeared. I couldn't read it from the scan. I ended up having to go to the Aberdeen Public Library and pull the original microfilm to find that same issue, where the crease was positioned slightly differently under their reader. The original name was visible there. If you're doing serious research, you can't rely on digitized images alone, especially with papers from this era. The microfilm quality varies, and some issues were poorly filmed to begin with.
Another thing most people don't expect: obituaries from the 1890s and early 1900s in Aberdeen are inconsistent in format. Some are short three-line notices that just state a name, date of death, and funeral home. Others are multi-column pieces with biographical details, surviving family members, and even employment history. The longer ones tend to be more useful, but they're also more likely to contain errors because they were written from memory or secondhand information by someone who may not have known the family well. A short, factual obituary is sometimes more reliable than a lengthy one. You should also be aware of the gaps in coverage. There are periods where the Aberdeen News didn't publish regularly due to financial difficulties or ownership changes. The years around 1893 and 1918-1919 are particularly spotty, partly because of the economic depression and partly because of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which overwhelmed the newspaper staff and the community. If your ancestor died during one of these periods, the obituary may not exist, or it may have been placed in a smaller competing paper like the Aberdeen Republican, which had its own separate archive trail. For the pre-1900 period, you'll also want to check church records alongside the newspaper obituaries. Aberdeen had a significant German and Scandinavian immigrant population, and many of those families recorded deaths in their church registers before civil registration was consistently enforced. The Catholic records at St. Joseph's and the Lutheran records from various congregations can fill in dates and relationships that the newspapers simply didn't include. These records are held at the Diocesan Archives in Sioux Falls and at the South Dakota State Archives, and some have been digitized on FamilySearch, but not all of them. You may need to submit a research request if what you need isn't online.
The biggest practical limitation I've found with this entire process is that Aberdeen is a relatively small market, which means many people who died in the area had their obituaries placed but the newspaper coverage itself is incomplete. Some family members paid for notices, others didn't, and there's no way to know which deaths went unreported. If you're researching a family member and can't find an obituary, it doesn't automatically mean they weren't important or well-connected. It may just mean their family didn't place one, or the newspaper wasn't covering that neighborhood well at the time. When you do find useful obituaries, extract every name mentioned and treat it as a potential research lead. Spouses, children, siblings, friends, neighbors, employers, and ministers are all fair game. I once traced an entire branch of a family forward by following a friend's name mentioned in passing in an 1898 obituary. That friend turned out to be the brother-in-law of my actual ancestor, and following that connection opened up records that would have been impossible to find otherwise. The obituary itself contained almost nothing useful about the person I was originally looking for, but it was gold for the wider family network. If you hit a wall with newspaper records, the Pennington County courthouse is the next place to check. Death certificates, probate files, and marriage records are all held there. The county has been fairly good about digitizing some of its records, but a lot still exists only in physical form. A phone call to the clerk's office can save you a trip if you just need to confirm whether a particular record type exists for a given year.
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