Reading Old Obituaries is Actually Exhausting Work
The Citizen Tribune covers Morristown and the surrounding Hamblen County area. When you start pulling obituaries from their archives, you quickly realize that nothing about this process is smooth. The online archive exists, but it is fragmented across multiple platforms and old print editions that were never properly digitized. I spent three weeks last year tracking down a single family line because the microfilm at the public library had been relocated twice and the index cards were misfiled under the wrong decade. The Citizen Tribune publishes obituaries both online and in print. Their website runs on a system called Newspapers.com integration for archive access, which gives you searchability but introduces its own layer of problems. The OCR (optical character recognition) on older articles is rough. Names get misread. Dates shift by years. I ran into this when looking up a death record from 1974 where the system read the year as 1979. The actual obituary was printed on a Tuesday, not a Sunday like the database suggested. I ended up going to the library in person and pulling the physical paper off the microfilm shelf to confirm what actually happened. Here is how the process actually works when you do it right.
Start with the free search on the Citizen Tribune website at citizentribune.com. Use their obituary filter. Most people stop there. They find a name, read the brief summary, and call it done. That summary is not the full obituary. It is usually a truncated version designed for web traffic. The full text lives in the print edition or on Newspapers.com behind a subscription wall. If you need the complete version, you are going to need a Newspapers.com account or a library card that grants free access through your local branch. The Morristown-Hamblen Public Library provides this at no charge. Their subscription covers the Citizen Tribune back to roughly 2004. Before that, you are dealing with physical archives or digitized newspapers.com records that are incomplete. The trick most people miss is cross-referencing. An obituary in the Citizen Tribune will mention a surviving spouse, children, sometimes a parent. Those names are rarely linked anywhere in the article. You have to take those names and run them separately through the same search. One obituary for a woman named Margaret Louise Caldwell from 1988 mentioned her brother James Caldwell who predeceased her in 1972. James had his own obituary two years earlier. Without pulling that second one, you would never know James died in a farming accident near Tazewell, which explains why the family moved out of the area a decade later. That detail does not appear in Margaret's obituary. It is entirely isolated in James's own notice. I found this out the hard way. My grandmother's side of the family had a gap between 1968 and 1975 where no one seemed to appear in any records I could find. I thought they had simply moved away. After three days of digging through James's obituary and tracing his military service records that were mentioned in passing, I discovered they had relocated to Texas after his death. The gap was not a missing family. It was a geographic move that the paper trail only reveals when you connect the dots manually.
The Citizen Tribune also runs memory-shrine style paid memorials alongside actual obituaries. These are not the same thing. A memory shrine is paid content placed by family members. It reads differently, often includes more personal detail, and may reference events or relationships that never appeared in the standard obituary format. Some researchers treat them as equivalent. They are not. Memory shrines are promotional in nature and occasionally contain inaccuracies that family members want to preserve exactly as they remember, even if those memories conflict with public records. I once saw a memory shrine claim a man served in Vietnam when his draft card and VA records showed he was classified 4-F due to a pre-existing condition. The family did not want to discuss that part of his history. The obituary, filed through the funeral home, listed the correct information but was far more sparse. If you are doing genealogical research, here is the practical workflow that actually saves time instead of wasting it. First, get a Newspapers.com subscription if you plan to do this regularly. It costs about $24.99 per month. Your local library may cover it for free. The Hamblen County public library system does. Walk in and ask for the Newspapers.com terminal in the reference section. They have two dedicated computers for this. Arrive between 10 AM and 2 PM on a weekday and you will almost certainly find an open machine without waiting. Weekends are a different story. I went in on a Saturday and had to wait forty minutes for a terminal to free up.
Get the Full Details
Second, use the advanced search operators on Newspapers.com. The basic search is useless for obituaries because it returns every mention of a name across every article type. Use the filter for "Obituaries" under content type. Combine that with a date range that is slightly wider than what you think you need. Death records are rarely published the day someone dies. There is a lag of two to four days typically. If someone died on a Wednesday, the obituary usually appears Thursday or Friday. Sometimes it runs the following Monday if the family needed extra time to coordinate details. Set your date range to include the full week after the expected death date. Third, save everything immediately. Newspapers.com sessions time out. I have lost entire search results because I got distracted reading an unrelated article and walked away from my terminal. The session expired. The saved search cleared. Everything was gone. Take screenshots of every obituary page you pull. Write down the exact URL. Note the publication date, the volume, and the page number if it is a print edition. This takes thirty seconds per article and saves you hours of re-searching later. Fourth, check the funeral home listings. The Citizen Tribune partners with several funeral homes in the area. E.B. Dyer Funeral Home, Graham-Cooke Funeral Home, and Huddleston Funeral Home all have submitted obituaries through the paper for decades. Some of these funeral homes maintain their own online archives that predate what appears in the newspaper. Graham-Cooke has a page that goes back to the late 1990s in some cases, with details not found in the Tribune's digital archive. I found a full service listing for a 1996 funeral that included the pastor's name, the cemetery plot location, and the specific flowers chosen by the family. None of that appeared in the Citizen Tribune version of the same obituary. It was all in the funeral home's own database.
The biggest limitation of this whole process is the pre-2004 gap. The Citizen Tribune's online archive is thin before 2004. What exists is mostly through Newspapers.com's digitization of physical microfilm, and that digitization was done in batches over many years with inconsistent quality. Articles from the 1980s are often blurry, partially cropped, or missing entire columns. The 1970s are worse. The 1960s are sparse enough that you should expect to fill gaps with secondary sources like census records, social security death index entries, and Tennessee state archives. There is no workaround for the physical archive requirement before 2004. If you need something from 1972 and it is not showing up on Newspapers.com, you go to the Morristown-Hamblen Public Library and ask for the microfilm for that specific month. The reference librarian can pull it in about five minutes. You then scan the relevant pages yourself using the library's scanner. This is faster and produces better quality than whatever digitized version exists online. I scanned about two hundred obituary pages this way during my research and the results were significantly clearer than the Newspapers.com versions of the same articles. One final note about what you will actually find in these obituaries. They are not reliable primary sources for birth dates, marriage dates, or parent names. Funeral homes and family members submitting obituaries frequently get these details wrong. I found at least six separate obituaries in the Citizen Tribune archive where the listed birth year was off by three to five years. In one case, a death certificate confirmed the correct year was two years earlier than what the obituary stated. The error originated from the family member filling out the submission form and misremembering the date. This happens constantly. Always verify critical dates against official records. The obituary is a starting point, not a conclusion.
The Citizen Tribune obituaries for Morristown are a useful resource if you understand their limitations. They are fragmented, incomplete before 2004, and sometimes contain errors that slip through without correction. But they do capture details that other records omit, especially the personal touches that family members include in submissions. A well-researched obituary can tell you what church someone attended, what organization they belonged to, what their favorite fishing spot was, and who brought the flowers. Those details do not exist anywhere else in the public record. They are worth the effort to find.
