Uncovering The Secrets Of Union Sun Journal Obituaries A Glimpse Into The Agony And Elegy Of Life

How To Actually Use The Union Sun Journal Obituary Archives

I spent three weekends trying to pull death records for a family genealogy project, and the Union Sun Journal obituaries turned out to be one of the better local sources I found. Not perfect, but usable if you know where to look. First off, the paper covers Lenoir County and surrounding areas in eastern North Carolina. The obituaries run daily, usually in the back section. They changed formats a few times over the years, which matters if you are hunting for someone who died before 2015. The online archive lives at union sunjournal.com. You can search by name, but the search function only goes back a few years without a subscription. The print archives at the Kinston public library go further, all the way to the early 2000s if you need them. I went there on a Tuesday morning, got a researcher card, and spent about four hours flipping through microfilm for deaths between 2008 and 2012. Found three obituaries that had been poorly OCR'd on the website, which meant they were invisible in any digital search.

Here is what I learned about the actual content. Most obituaries in this paper follow a standard format. They list the person name, age, date of death, place of death when relevant, a short biography, surviving family members, sometimes the funeral home, and service details. That is the baseline. The useful stuff for research is in the surviving family section. It usually lists spouse, children, grandchildren, and occasionally siblings or parents. I have seen missing information here, though. A few obituaries skip the grandchildren entirely, and some don't mention a spouse if the person was widowed. Read past the first paragraph. The second paragraph often has more detail. If you are looking for something specific, like a middle name or a maiden name, check the birth date. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not. One obit I needed listed the person as "Robert James Miller" on social security documents, but the newspaper just wrote "Bob Miller" with no middle name. The surviving family section had a son named "James R. Miller," which confirmed the middle name indirectly. You have to piece things together. Another thing that catches people out: the paper sometimes runs a death notice rather than a full obituary. Death notices are shorter, usually two or three paragraphs, and mostly just state the facts. Full obituaries can be a page or more, with more personal detail. The layout is different too. Death notices tend to appear in a blocked format on one page, while full obits get more space. If you are looking for someone and the search pulls up a dead-end notice, check the adjacent pages. They sometimes run the full version alongside it.

There is a problem with the microfilm. The older rolls are fine, but the ones from 2013 onward are spotty. I had an issue where a specific week in October 2014 was completely missing from the microfilm at the library. The library staff said the index was incomplete and recommended checking the newspaper's own archived email newsletter, which posted obituaries daily. That worked. The online emails from that period had the full text, even though the print microfilm did not. For anyone doing actual research, I would recommend this approach. Start with the online search for recent years. Then go to the library for anything older than five years. Bring a camera or phone if they allow it, because copying by hand takes forever. Most people don't realize how much time handwriting slows you down. I typed up about twelve obituaries per hour max when I was writing them out. With a camera, I could get through a whole month in a couple of sessions. There are gaps in the archive. Some issues from the late 2000s are missing entirely, apparently due to a flood that hit the Kinston area a few years back. The library has digitized what they could recover, but a number of volumes are still gone. If your person died during a gap, you are out of luck with this source. Check other papers in the region then. The Wilson Weekly or the Goldsboro News-Argus sometimes pick up obituaries from nearby counties.

One more thing nobody tells you about these archives: the date formatting. Older obituaries sometimes list the death date as "passed away on" followed by a day of the week and month, without the year. The year is usually in the headline or at the top, but if you are scanning quickly you might miss it. I spent about twenty minutes looking for a specific obit in the wrong year because the headline year was in a smaller font than I expected. Overall, the Union Sun Journal obituaries are a solid resource if you treat them like any other local paper archive. They are not comprehensive, they have gaps, and the online search is limited. But for Lenoir County and the surrounding area, they cover a lot of ground. I found obituaries going back to the early 2000s, and a few earlier ones I wasn't expecting. The trick is knowing when to stop searching online and actually go to the library.