Working With Old Newspaper Archives Is Messier Than People Expect
I spent three weeks last month trying to track down a single obituary from the Erie Times News for someone who died in 1963. The digitized version on Newspapers.com was there but completely unreadable. The scan was misaligned, the microfilm had deteriorated at that exact section, and the OCR had corrupted every other word. I ended up driving to the Erie County Historical Society because they still had the physical paper in their basement vault. That took four hours and a signed note from the archivist. Most people give up after the second dead end. Don't. Searching older local papers requires a very different approach than looking up anything from the 2000s. The digitization gap is real. Between roughly 1940 and 1985, most regional newspapers were either never digitized or were scanned poorly before major genealogy databases picked them up. The Erie Times News falls squarely in that frustrating middle period. Knowing that upfront saves you a lot of wasted time.
Uncovering The Rich History Of Erie Times News Obituaries A Glimpse Into The Lives Of The Community
Start by understanding what you're actually searching for. Obituaries in local papers like the Erie Times News are not standardized documents. Before the 1990s, formats changed year to year, sometimes month to month. Some ran as brief two-paragraph notices. Others were full pages. A single issue might contain thirty deaths and only eight of them had actual obituaries. The rest just had death notices with a line or two. Learning to distinguish between an obituary and a death notice early on prevents false positives in your results. The actual search process depends entirely on which database you are using. Here's how I approach it, though I will note upfront that no single source has complete coverage for this paper. Step one: Check Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank simultaneously. These two have the bulk of the Erie Times News coverage. Newspapers.com has better OCR quality for the 1990s onward. GenealogyBank is hit or miss depending on the year. Run the same search on both and compare results. You will find different matches on each platform. I typically search by full name plus "died" or "passed away" and narrow by date range in two-week increments. Searching by exact month reduces noise dramatically.
Step two: Use the Erie Times News index if it exists for your time period. Many newspapers published monthly or annual indexes. The Erie Times News did this intermittently. Those indexes are gold because they list every obituary with page numbers. Finding the right index volume saves you from manually browsing hundreds of issues. Check the library catalog at the Erie County Public Library. They hold microfilm copies of the indexes going back to the 1950s. Call ahead. Staff changes mean the microfilm sometimes gets shelved incorrectly. Step three: Cross-reference with the Pittsburgh Press or Buffalo Evening News. This sounds wrong but it works. Regional papers often picked up obituaries from surrounding areas when families couldn't afford full-length notices locally. I found a 1971 Erie obituary that only appeared in the Pittsburgh Press because the person's family lived near the border and used a Pittsburgh funeral home. Checking neighboring metro papers catches obituaries that should have been in the local paper but weren't.
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Where The Process Breaks Down And What To Do Instead
The biggest problem I run into is name commonality. Searching for "John Smith died Erie" returns hundreds of irrelevant results because the database doesn't know which John Smith you want and the OCR misreads surnames as other surnames constantly. I get "Smith" read as "Shmith," "Smyth," and sometimes just "S_m_th." There is no workaround except narrowing the date range aggressively and manually scanning results. It usually takes me twenty minutes per decade to sort through a decade's worth of misread names. That is not fast but it is faster than the alternative. Another breakdown point is missing years. The Erie Times News had layoffs and production changes over the decades. Some months have no obituaries at all because the paper simply didn't print them, not because the records were lost. I encountered this repeatedly with 1974. I spent an afternoon convinced the obituaries were destroyed until I compared it to the society pages from the same month. The paper was running normally. The deaths just weren't being recorded. That happens more than you would think. If you need something specific and the paper route is failing, the Erie County Clerk's office holds death certificates. They are public records but accessing them requires filling out a form and paying a fee. I prefer to exhaust the newspaper search first because obituaries contain family relationships and biographical details that death certificates do not. A death certificate lists a cause of death and parents' names. An obituary tells you about the person's life, their church, their veterans service, the soup kitchen they volunteered at. The difference matters if you are doing this for historical reasons rather than legal ones.
A Few Details Beginners Miss
Obituary lengths in the Erie Times News varied by socioeconomic factors. Well-to-do families paid for longer notices. Working-class obituaries from the 1960s are often one column at most. Do not assume a short notice means the person was unimportant. It usually just means the family had limited funds. I once spent time looking for a fuller obituary for a man I knew from census records had been a prominent union organizer. The paper gave him three sentences because his widow could not pay for more. The census record told me far more about his life than the obituary ever would. Also note that marriage announcements and obituaries sometimes appear in the same section but on facing pages in older issues. This means if you are searching for a spouse's name in a death notice, the living spouse's recent wedding announcement might be physically close in the paper. It sounds obvious until you are flipping through a digital scan and skip right past it because your eyes are locked on the death section. The Erie Times News also merged with other regional publications at various points in its history. Pay attention to masthead changes. A paper titled "Erie Evening Times" versus "Erie Times News" versus "Erie Times" might be the same publication or a successor with a different archive lineage. The digitized versions sometimes mislabel these distinctions. I learned this the hard way when I spent an hour searching a collection that turned out to be from a different newspaper entirely.
What To Download Or Save For Future Reference
I always save PDFs of any obituaries I find immediately. Database links rot. Pages get moved or taken down without warning. I have lost access to at least a dozen obituaries because a genealogy site reorganized their database and the original scan disappeared. A folder on your computer with properly named files is the only reliable backup. Name them consistently: LastName_FirstName_Year_obit.pdf. It sounds tedious but you will thank yourself six months later when you are trying to find that specific file again. Take screenshots of the index pages too if you find a useful index. Those indexes are sometimes harder to locate than the obituaries themselves. Having the page numbers recorded directly in your notes means you do not have to hunt for the index volume again later. Most importantly, keep a log of your search parameters. Date ranges, database platforms, specific names tried, and results found. I use a simple spreadsheet with columns for surname, given name, estimated date, database used, result status, and any notes. Five minutes of logging prevents the same dead-end search from happening twice. I have caught myself repeating the same futile search three times in a single month before I started tracking this properly.
There is no perfect method for pulling information out of old local newspapers. The digitization quality varies. The indexes are incomplete. The physical copies are deteriorating. But working through those problems systematically usually yields results that a casual search never will. The Erie Times News covers a community with deep roots. The obituaries are valuable precisely because they are local and specific, even when the record keeping around them is messy.
