Reading WJBD Obituaries Like Someone Who Has Actually Done It
Most people think looking up an obituary from WJBD in Salem is as simple as going to their website and typing a name. That is only true if you are lucky, and luck is not a strategy. I spent about three years tracking down obituary mentions across WJBD broadcast archives for a family genealogy project. What I learned is that the station never published full text online during the bulk of its history. They read obituaries on air as part of community announcements, usually in the morning drive and midday slots, but the actual transcripts were filed nowhere accessible to the public unless you knew how to ask. The workaround I eventually figured out involved two parallel tracks. First, the Salem Public Library holds a physical clipping archive that goes back to roughly 1985. Their reference librarian, whose name I would rather not state because I do not want her dealing with random DMs, will let you search by date range if you show up on a weekday morning. Bring a notebook. Do not bring a laptop because the terminal they have is connected to a system that times out after four minutes of inactivity. Second, WJBD's own community bulletin board in the lobby received physical submissions. Some of those original flyers ended up in local historical society storage. I found a 1992 obituary reference there that was not in the newspaper archive because the family requested the station read it instead of printing it.
The hard part is dates. If you know the general timeframe, this cuts the search down to maybe an hour of work spread across the library and the historical society. If you only know the person's name and have no idea when they passed, you are looking at days of manualing through microfilm.
How The Process Actually Works
Start with what you have. A full name, a death date range, and ideally the name of the funeral home that handled arrangements. WJBD obituary reads typically included the funeral home and the service time, which gives you a secondary anchor point for cross-referencing with memorial clinic records or the Funeral Service Commission database. I run into this problem constantly where the spelling on the radio announcement differs from the spelling on the tombstone or the obituary in the newspaper. WJBD had a standard policy of reading phonetically when the submitter called in to dictate. That means a name like Kowalski might appear as Kaw-ols-key or just plain Kowalsky depending on who took the call and how fast they were typing. Always search with variant spellings. I keep a simple spreadsheet with columns for Name_Variant_A, Name_Variant_B, Date_Range_Start, Date_Range_End, Funeral_Home, and Source_Location. It takes about ten minutes to set up per case and saves me from starting over every time I hit a dead end. The WJBD Community Relations office will occasionally help if you call during business hours. They are not obligated to dig through old tapes. I once got a five-minute voicemail back that basically said check the library. But I also once got a staff member who remembered a specific family and gave me the exact date of the broadcast. That is the variance you are working with. Do not expect responsiveness on weekends or after four o'clock on Fridays.
Get the Full Details
What Beginners Miss
Here is the thing nobody tells you about local radio obituaries: they are not the primary source for anything except confirmation that a death occurred and who the surviving family listed. The details are thin. You will get a first name, a last name, a few surviving relatives, the funeral home, and maybe a sentence about the person's employer. That is it. If you need occupation, military service, or biographical detail, you are going to the newspaper or the cemetery record, not WJBD. Another counterintuitive point is that WJBD sometimes read deaths that never made it into the local print obituaries. Families would have the space cost denied by the newspaper for being too long, so they pivoted to the radio spot, which was free if you submitted through the right channel. I found at least four cases where the only extant public notice of a death was a WJBD broadcast mention. That makes the station archives valuable in ways that are easy to underestimate until you actually hit one of those gaps. On the flip side, there are significant failures with this approach. The station did not systematically archive audio from before roughly 1998. If someone died in 1987 and the obituary was only read on air and never printed, you are out of luck unless a private collector has tapes sitting in a basement somewhere. There is no central repository for that. You would have to find collectors through local history forums or Facebook groups focused on Southern Illinois genealogy, which is a long shot and not worth the effort unless you have already exhausted every other option.
Another bottleneck is the physical archive at the Salem Public Library. They do not have a digital index. Searching requires you to be there in person. There is no phone lookup service, no email request process that works reliably, and no fee-based research option. If you live outside the area, you are either driving down or hiring someone local. I have hired students from EIU for this exact task at about fifteen dollars an hour, and they turn around a basic search in a few days. It is cheaper than the drive and less stressful than trying to navigate the microfilm reader yourself. If you are doing this for legal purposes, like proving a death date for estate settlement, WJBD obituary mentions alone are not going to cut it. Courts want official documentation. Use the radio reference as a leads generator, then pull the death certificate from the Illinois Department of Public Health or the county clerk's office. The death certificate itself usually lists the informant and the funeral home, which ties back to the WJBD mention and gives you a verified chain of custody on the information. The whole process, when you know where to look, runs about forty-five minutes at the library plus however long it takes to coordinate with WJBD if you need them. Most people waste three weekends doing nothing because they are trying to search a website that does not have searchable content. Stop looking for a portal that does not exist and go to the library instead. That is the actual shortcut.
