Uncovering The Rich History Of Mckeesport Obituaries A Window Into Tube Citys Past

Where to Actually Find These Records

McKeesport obituaries live in a handful of scattered places, and most people don't know where to start looking beyond the basic search engines. The Allegheny County Courthouse Genealogy Room holds microfilm of the Pittsburgh Press and smaller local papers going back to the late 1800s. You need a county ID card to get in, and the reading room closes at 4:30 on weekdays. Don't bother going on a Friday afternoon unless you want to race the clock. The McKeesport Public Library has a local history section on the third floor that includes bound volumes of the McKeesport Evening News and the Leader-Telegram. These run from 1913 through the 1980s and contain death notices that never made it into the digital archives. The librarian there, a woman named Carol who's been working there since 1994, will let you pull the microfilm if you ask nicely. She also knows which boxes in the basement stacks have the unindexed funeral home submissions from the 1960s and 70s.

Uncovering The Rich History Of Mckeesport Obituaries A Window Into Tube Citys Past

The steel industry shaped everything about these records. Tube City wasn't just a nickname; it was the economic engine that determined who lived here, who died here, and how their deaths were reported. When you read obituaries from the 1920s and 30s, you'll see a remarkable pattern: men listed as "pipe fitter," "tube mill operator," or "steelworker" at Jones & Laughlin, Republic Steel, or National Tube. The funeral homes were almost all local. D'Ercole, Scholer, and early on the Weir funeral home handled most of the arrangements. These names show up repeatedly across decades of records. Here's something most people miss. The obituaries from the late 1940s through the early 1970s contain coded information about union membership that researchers often overlook. Phrases like "longtime member of Iron Workers Local 437" or "retired from the BWC shop" aren't just biographical filler. They tell you exactly which shift your ancestor worked, which plant, and what their seniority level was. Cross-reference those with the steelworker pension records at the Philadelphia Federal Building and you can reconstruct entire family work histories that no single document contains. I ran into a specific problem last year while researching a McKeesport family line. The obituary for a man named Vincent Kowalski listed his birth year as 1918, but his draft card from World War II showed 1916, and his social security application said 1917. Three different official documents, three different years. The workaround was to pull his naturalization petition from the McKeesport federal court records, which listed his actual place of birth as a village near Cracow in Poland, and then match that to the passenger manifest from 1921. That gave me the correct date of birth and explained the discrepancy — his mother had rounded down the age on the WWI draft card so he'd qualify for younger service categories, then kept the same number on later documents out of habit.

The digitized records are improving but they have serious gaps. Newspapers.com and Ancestry have scanned most of the McKeesport Evening News from 1950 onward, but the coverage is spotty before 1940. More importantly, the death index cards at the Allegheny County Health Department only go back to 1909, and even then the handwriting on the original registers is difficult to read for entries from the 1910s and 20s. I've spent hours squinting at microfilm copies where the ink has faded to nearly invisible. Scanning the originals yourself with a decent camera setup and adjusting the contrast in free software like ImageJ usually makes them readable, but it takes patience.

What These Records Actually Reveal

Obituaries from Tube City tell you things that census records never will. They show which churches people actually attended versus the ones their families listed for respectability. They reveal migration patterns — you'll see surnames that dominate certain neighborhoods on specific streets. On Forbes Avenue, you'll find Italian surnames in the 1930s obituaries. On Brinton Avenue, Polish and Slovak names. On South 5th Street, Irish families. These patterns held remarkably steady from the 1910s through the 1960s. The racial composition of McKeesport obituaries before the 1950s is another data point that doesn't show up in most histories of the city. The Black obituaries from this period are mostly concentrated in the 200 and 300 blocks of East Carson Street, which was the center of the city's Black community. Finding them requires searching the newspaper databases with specific surname lists, because the death notices were often printed in a small section at the bottom of the societal page rather than in the main obituary column. Many researchers skip over these entirely because they don't know where to look. There's a practical bottleneck you should be aware of. The McKeesport area has roughly 12,000 to 15,000 recorded deaths per decade across the relevant time period, and the digitized record sets cover maybe 60 percent of that total. The remaining 40 percent exists only on physical microfilm or in funeral home archives that have never been catalogued. Some of those funeral homes closed when the industry consolidated in the 1990s, and their paper records were discarded. This isn't theoretical — I've heard from at least three researchers who lost access to specific collections when a family-run funeral home in the Highland Park area closed and the new owners threw out decades of files.

The best approach combines multiple sources rather than relying on any single one. Start with the death certificates from the Allegheny County Health Department, which include the informant's name and relationship to the deceased. That informant is often a child or sibling who lived in the same house, and their name gives you a thread to pull. Then check the obituary in the local paper for the narrative version. Then look at the cemetery records — St. Joseph's, Calvary, Mount Washington Cemetery — which often have plot maps showing which families were buried together and when the plots were purchased. The purchase date can help you establish when a family moved into a particular neighborhood. One more thing that isn't obvious. The McKeesport Leader-Telegram merged with the Evening News in 1982, and after that the obituary section changed dramatically. The earlier paper published longer, more detailed notices that included the full list of surviving relatives, the pastor who officiated, and sometimes even the name of the florist. After the merger, the notices became shorter and more formulaic. If you're researching someone who died after 1982, you may need to check the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette instead, which picked up many of the McKeesport readership after the local paper folded.

Getting the Physical Records

Requesting death certificates from Allegheny County costs $15 per copy and can take two to four weeks if you do it by mail. Going in person to the Register of Wills office on Grant Street in Pittsburgh gets you the certificate the same day for $20. You need a legitimate genealogical reason listed on the application, and you need to show photo ID. They don't ask tough questions about what you're researching, but they do check that your relationship to the deceased or your stated purpose meets their criteria. For the newspaper archives, the best option is the genealogy room at the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh on Forbes Street. They have the complete run of the Pittsburgh Press on microfilm, which includes McKeesport obituaries from the early 1900s that never appeared in the local papers. The press had a wider distribution network and carried death notices from suburbs that the smaller papers ignored. This is where you'll find the obituaries of people from McKeesport who died in Pittsburgh hospitals, which was common before the regional medical centers opened in the 1960s. The church records are the hardest part. Most of the Catholic parishes in McKeesport — St. John the Baptist, St. Augustine, St. Mary's, Sacred Heart — have kept burial registers since the late 1800s. You need to contact each parish directly and request a copy. Some will do it for free, others charge $10 to $25. A few require you to come in person. The Orthodox and Eastern Catholic parishes are even more inconsistent. St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church on Hill Street has excellent records. The small Protestant denominations — the Church of the Brethren, the Salvation Army, various Baptist congregations — often lost their records during building renovations or when the churches themselves closed. There's no master list of what survives. You just have to check each one.

If you're willing to invest the time, the oral history angle is worth pursuing. The McKeesport Area Historical Society has a collection of recorded interviews with former residents, many of whom talk about family deaths and funeral traditions. These recordings are not fully indexed, but the society's volunteer staff can search them by name if you provide the full name and approximate year. One interview from 1998 with a woman named Margaret O'Brien described how her family arranged for her grandfather's body to be returned from a Pittsburgh hospital in a railway freight car because the family couldn't afford a hearse. That detail wouldn't appear in any written record. The biggest limitation of this entire process is that McKeesport's population declined sharply after the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s and 80s. Many families left the area entirely, taking personal papers, photo albums, and family Bibles with them. The records that survive in institutional collections represent only what remained after people moved away. What's missing is just as important as what you find, and it's impossible to know how much is actually gone versus just sitting in someone's attic somewhere in Ohio or Florida.