Working With Historical Scranton Obituaries
Obituaries in Scranton's newspapers are one of the most practical tools for local history research. They contain dates, addresses, family connections, immigration details, and employment information that census records alone won't give you. The challenge isn't finding them — it's knowing which sources to search and how to handle the gaps. The main newspaper for Scranton for most of the modern era is The Times (which merged into The Times-Tribune). Before that consolidation, there were several competing papers in Lackawanna County. When you're searching obituaries, you need to know which paper ran them and when. The Times covered a broad swath of the city. Smaller ethnic and Catholic papers ran their own notices in different sections. I started with the Delaware County Library system's digital archives and the ScanDigital collection. Most scans are on microfilm at the Lackawanna County Historical Society as well, but if you're not local, the digitized versions save a trip. The full run goes back to the 1860s in patches, though coverage is spotty between 1877 and 1900 for some sections. The paper was destroyed by fire during the 1877 railroad riots, so any obituaries from that window are mostly lost unless they appeared in another publication.
Here's what I found after spending months going through these records. The OCR on many of the scanned pages is unreliable. Searching by name through the digital portal frequently returns nothing, even when the obituary is clearly there. The workaround is to browse the image-by-image archive and use date ranges instead. If you know the approximate year of death, narrow your search to that year and flip through the obituary sections manually. It takes longer, but it actually works. Another thing people don't always account for: Scranton had a large immigrant population from Poland, Slovakia, Italy, and Ireland, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Obituaries for those communities were often printed in their native language or in papers like the Polish-American Gazette. If you're researching a family with Eastern European roots, The Times alone won't cover everything. Check the Polish National Home publications and the Slovak St. Cyril and Methodius society records. Those are harder to access and usually require a visit to the historical society or a subscription to a genealogy platform like Ancestry's ethnic newspaper collection. Names change across records is a real problem. A person might appear as "Stanislaw Kowalski" in a Polish paper and "Stephen Kowalsky" in The Times. Indexes that only capture the English spelling will miss the original notice entirely. I kept a spread-sheet tracking alternate spellings for every family I researched. It added maybe ten minutes per search, but it cut my missed-record rate significantly.
The death certificate index from the Pennsylvania Department of Health is another angle. It won't give you the full obituary text, but it confirms dates and parent names, which helps you verify which newspaper notice belongs to which person. Cross-referencing a death certificate with an obituary typically takes about twenty minutes and eliminates a lot of false positives from name variations. If you want downloadable records, the main options are the ScanDigital archive through Delaware County Library, Ancestry's "Pennsylvania, U.S., Obituary Collection," and Fold3's newspaper database. The Library of Congress chroniclingamerica.gov also has some Scranton titles, though the coverage is thinner. None of these are free in a usable way. Expect to pay for a subscription or visit a library that provides access. There are limits to what you can get from this route. Before 1900, many working-class obituaries were minimal — a single line with a name and date. The detail level you'll find depends heavily on social class, religious affiliation, and how long the family had been in Scranton. New arrivals often didn't have the community ties that produced longer notices. That doesn't mean the information isn't there, but you'll need to look at census records, church registers, and cemetery records to fill the blanks.
Get the Full Details
Cemetery data from Mountain View Cemetery and Calvary Cemetery is public and useful for confirming burial locations and spouse names. The Philadelphia Public Library has some transcribed burial records for Lackawanna County that are worth checking. Again, these are reference materials, not replacements for the actual obituary images. The process itself is straightforward once you know the sources. Identify the person, narrow the date range, browse the paper images directly, check cross-references with death indexes, and document every source with the exact page or image number. It usually takes me about forty-five minutes per individual to gather a solid set of records, not counting the time spent deciphering faded type or dealing with incomplete scans. One more practical note: the Times-Tribune archives transitioned to digital-only a few years ago, and some older physical copies were discarded rather than preserved. If you're working with cases from the 1940s through the 1970s, those may not exist anywhere in readable form unless someone already photographed them. I ran into this with a specific case in 1963 where the obituary existed only as a handwritten note in a box at the historical society. The digital archive had a gap exactly for that month.
The bottom line is that Scranton's obituary collections are rich but fragmented. They require patience, knowledge of multiple sources, and a willingness to do manual browsing instead of relying on search functions. When they work, they give you information you can't get from any other single record type.
