Reading Indiana Times Obituaries for Genealogy
Obituaries in the Indiana Times are a practical starting point for tracing Hoosier family lines, but they require more patience than most people expect. The records span several decades and the quality varies significantly depending on the era and the reporter who wrote the notice. I spent years pulling these files for clients, and what follows is how the process actually works rather than some idealized version. Start with the microfilm or the digitized archive at the Indiana State Library or your local county historical society. The Indiana Times went through several name changes and mergers over the years. What was once the Indianapolis Times folded into the Indianapolis Star in the late 1990s, which means older obituaries from the Times are sometimes indexed under different titles or not indexed at all. I learned this the hard way when a client was convinced her great-grandfather's death notice appeared in the Times in March 1943. It didn't. It ran in the Star under a different section heading because the merger had already been announced but not fully executed in the indexing system. The workaround was to pull the physical microfilm for that exact date range and scan through it manually. Indexes are useful guides, but they are not reliable for the entire run of the paper. The information you will find in these obituaries ranges from sparse to surprisingly detailed. Pre-1970 notices often list only the surviving family members and the funeral home. Post-1980 obituaries tend to include more biographical detail, sometimes paragraphs about education, military service, and hobbies. The shift happened because newspaper staff sizes shrank and families began writing their own notices rather than relying on the obituary desk. This matters for your research because it changes what you can trust. A professionally written obituary from the 1950s may have been edited for accuracy by the newsroom. A self-written notice from 2005 was vetted by the family and may contain errors that no one caught.
One counter-intuitive detail that trips people up involves maiden names and married names. Indiana did not require women to change their surnames upon marriage until much later, and even then many kept their birth names professionally. The obituary might list a woman as "Martha Louise Jenkins, widow of Robert Hale," but her birth certificate, census records, and Social Security applications could all use "Martha Louise Hale." I had a case where a researcher hit a dead end for six months because she searched for Martha Jenkins in every database. She found her death certificate eventually, which listed her mother's maiden name, and that clue opened the whole branch. Always cross-reference the obituary name against multiple documents rather than assuming it is the only version of the name. Another limitation worth stating plainly: not every death gets an obituary in the Indiana Times. The paper prioritized residents of Marion County and the surrounding Indianapolis area. If your ancestor lived in rural Indiana, particularly in the northern or southwestern parts of the state, they likely did not appear in this publication. The workaround is to check the local county newspaper for that specific area. There is also the Indiana Funeral Home Records collection at the Indiana State Library, which documents deaths regardless of whether an obituary was published. It is not a substitute for the newspaper notice, but it fills the gap for people who died without press coverage. When extracting genealogical data from an obituary, record every name mentioned, including distant cousins, in-laws, and friends. These relationships are the connective tissue that helps you verify family links. A brother-in-law mentioned in passing might be the key to linking two branches of a family that otherwise look unrelated. I typically create a spreadsheet with columns for the deceased, surviving spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings, and any other named relatives. Then I search each name in census records, marriage licenses, and probate files. This process usually takes about forty-five minutes per obituary if you have good database access, longer if you need to visit records in person.
Digital access has made this easier but also introduced new problems. The Indiana State Library's digital archive is searchable by name and date, but the OCR quality is inconsistent. Names with unusual spellings or faded print often do not parse correctly in the search field. When a direct name search fails, try a broader date range and scan the results visually. It is slower but catches what the database misses. I also recommend downloading or photographing the full obituary page rather than relying on the text extraction. Handwritten notations by the newspaper staff, marginal corrections, and adjacent classified ads sometimes contain useful context that the digital text drops entirely. If you are just starting with Indiana Times obituaries, begin with a known death date and work backward. The obituaries are arranged chronologically, so a narrow date window reduces the noise significantly. You can usually find the relevant issue within ten minutes if you know the approximate date. From there, extract the family names and follow them into other records. The obituary is a snapshot, not a complete biography, but it is often the only document that connects multiple generations in a single source.
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