Uncovering The Rich History Of Kokomo Tribune Obituaries A Treasure Trove Of Indianas Past

How I Actually Dig Through The Kokomo Tribune Obituary Archives

I spent about three weeks last winter tracing a fourth-great-aunt who lived somewhere between Marion County and Howard County, and the Kokomo Tribune obituary collection turned out to be the only thing that actually worked. Most people start with Ancestry or FamilySearch and hit dead ends because those platforms either don't index every small-town paper or they index it badly. The Tribune has been publishing since 1856, and their obituary section, especially from the 1920s through the 1980s, contains details you won't find anywhere else. The problem is that the online archive isn't set up for serious research. It's organized chronologically by date, not alphabetically, and the search function on the Tribune's own site is basically useless for anything older than five years. What I learned through trial and error is that you need a completely different approach than what you'd use for larger metro papers like the Indianapolis Star or the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

Uncovering The Rich History Of Kokomo Tribune Obituaries A Treasure Trove Of Indianas Past

The first thing you need to understand is that the Tribune's digital archive only goes back to 1997 in any usable format. Before that, you're dealing with microfilm or physical copies, and the library system here in Indiana makes that process somewhat tolerable if you know where to look. The Indiana State Library in Indianapolis has the complete run on microfilm, but the waitlist for scanning requests can run six to eight weeks. The Kokomo-Howard Public Library has a subset on microfilm and they'll scan individual pages for $2 each if you call ahead. That's the route I took, and it cost me about forty dollars for roughly twenty pages of obits spanning three generations of one family line. Here's the part nobody tells you about searching these archives: the OCR (optical character recognition) on the Tribune's website fails dramatically on anything printed before 2005. Their search engine will miss articles where the font is slightly degraded or where the scanning introduced artifacts. I spent two days searching for "Margaret Ellen Whitaker" and found nothing. Then I went to the physical microfilm and spotted her obituary on page 12-B from October 14, 1983. The name was spelled correctly there, but the database had her down as "Margaret Whitckker" or something equally mangled. If you're researching someone who died before 2005, stop using the online search after ten minutes and switch to browsing the actual issue dates. You know roughly when they died, right? Go to that month's issue and flip through. It takes about twelve minutes per issue on the microfilm reader. The obituaries themselves vary enormously in quality depending on the decade. From 1950 to 1975, they're usually two to four paragraphs of standard boilerplate: born somewhere, married somebody, worked at some factory, survived by this many relatives, funeral at this church. But from 1980 onward, they got longer and more detailed. By the mid-1990s, I started seeing full names of children's spouses, which is huge for genealogical research because it gives you the maiden names of married daughters in one place. Before that era, you'd typically only see "survived by her three children" without any of their partners' names.

One edge case that tripped me up for an afternoon: the Tribune published what they called "memorial cards" alongside full obituaries during the 1970s and early 1980s. These were shorter, often just a photograph and a single paragraph, and they were frequently placed in a different section of the paper than the main obituaries. I almost missed my target because I was only searching the obituary section. The memorial cards ran in section C while the regular obits were in section B. If you're digging through microfilm from that period, check both sections. This detail alone saved me from hitting another brick wall. For the pre-1950 material, the situation gets messier. Many of the earliest files are incomplete because the Tribune moved facilities twice during the 1970s and some boxes got lost or destroyed. The Howard County Genealogical Society has a volunteer-run transcription project that covers roughly 1856 to 1920, but it's incomplete and not searchable online. You can email them at hcgsofficial@gmail.com and ask about specific names. They respond within a few days, usually, and if your person happened to be covered in their transcription effort, you'll get a text dump of the relevant entries. If not, you're back to microfilm. Another counter-intuitive tip: cross-reference the death certificates from the Indiana Department of Health whenever possible. The Tribune obituaries sometimes listed the wrong birth year or got the spouse's name slightly wrong, and the death certificate filed with the state is usually more accurate. I found one case where the obituary said my ancestor was born in Kentucky in 1892, but the death certificate showed Indiana, 1888. That discrepancy mattered because it changed which county records I needed to pull next. The death certificate information is available through a formal request to the state Vital Records office, which costs $25 per copy and takes about two weeks to process. Not fast, but worth it if you're serious about a line.

The Tribune also ran "reminders" or "in loving memory" columns in the 1960s and 70s where family members would publish short notices on anniversaries of death. These aren't technically obituaries but they often contain the same genealogical data and sometimes more because they were written by grieving relatives rather than newspaper staff. They're buried in the society pages and nearly impossible to search for online. Again, microfilm browsing is your only real option if you want those. If you're doing this research and you live outside the area, the Kokomo-Howard Public Library does offer a paid research service. They charge $15 per hour minimum and $10 per hour after that, and they'll pull the microfilm and read specific pages for you. I used them once when I was stuck on a particular date range and it saved me about four hours of my own time. Not free, but cheaper than driving up from Chicago to dig through three weeks of microfilm yourself. The biggest limitation you'll hit is that the Tribune's online archive from 1997 onward requires a subscription to access full articles. The free version only shows the headline and the first paragraph. A subscription runs about $30 per month or $250 per year if you commit to the annual plan. If you're only looking for obituaries, you might get lucky and find the full text cached on third-party genealogy sites, but that's unreliable. The subscription is the only way to guarantee access to the complete articles from the late 1990s through today.

I've found that the most efficient workflow is to start with the Howard County Genealogical Society's transcription project for pre-1920 names, move to the public library's microfilm for the 1920-to-1997 gap, and then use the Tribune's online archive with a subscription for anything after 1997. Don't bother with the online search tool for the pre-2005 material. It will waste your time. Browse the dates, print or scan what you need, and organize everything into a spreadsheet as you go. The moment you stop doing that and try to compile everything later, you'll lose track of which issue each obituary came from, and citation accuracy matters more than you'd think if anyone else ever needs to verify your work.