Working with the Globe Gazette Archive
The Globe Gazette has been publishing obituaries for Mason City and the surrounding Butler County area since 1874. The paper is part of the McClatchy family of newspapers now, but the physical record predates all of that by over a century. If you are researching local history or genealogy, the paper is one of the better-documented regional sources in northeast Iowa. It is not perfect, and it has some frustrating gaps. I have spent more time than I care to admit digging through it. Most people start at the Ancestry.com or NewspaperArchive.com platforms because they have digitized the Globe Gazette. That works fine for quick lookups. But digitized text has OCR errors, and the search tools on those platforms are not especially good at handling variations in name spelling. A more reliable path goes through the State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines, which holds the microfilm collection for the Globe Gazette going back to the 1870s. The microfilm quality is decent, and you can usually read the full obituary as it appeared in print, including death notices that may have been too short to digitize. I found a 1923 obituary for a man named Henning that showed up under the misspelling "Henneing" in the online database. The microfilm had the correct spelling, and it took me about ten minutes to catch the error. Online search would have returned nothing.
Uncovering The Stories Behind The Names Mason City Ia Globe Gazette Obituaries
The actual process of extracting real information from these obituaries involves a few steps that are not obvious unless you have gone through the exercise enough times to notice the patterns. The first step is knowing what to look for beyond the basic biographical data. Obituaries in the Globe Gazette during the mid-twentieth century typically list survivors, places of employment, church affiliation, and membership in organizations like the Grange or the Odd Fellows. Those details matter for connecting people across census records. A name alone does not tell you much. A name plus the fact that someone worked at the Northern States Power Company and lived on North Ankeny Street in Mason City gives you multiple anchor points for cross-referencing. The second step is recognizing that obituaries were often written by the family and submitted to the newspaper. That means the information is second-hand or third-hand. I ran into this when researching a woman named Edna K. Larson who died in 1951. The obituary listed her husband as Carl Larson and said she was born in Norway. I could not find a Carl Larson married to an Edna in the 1940 census. It turned out her name was actually Edna K. Larsen, her husband's surname was misspelled, and she was born in Minnesota, not Norway. The family member who submitted the notice had made an honest mistake about her place of birth. Always verify with census or vital records. Never trust the obituary on its own. One thing beginners consistently overlook is the death index that ran alongside the obituaries. The Globe Gazette published a daily or weekly listing of deaths in the area, sometimes containing more detail than the printed obituary itself. These indices include the date of death, the full name, age, and sometimes the street address or the name of the funeral home. I used the death index to locate a person whose obituary was missing from the digitized run between 1962 and 1965, a known gap in the NewspaperArchive.com collection. The index entry gave me enough information to request the missing issue directly from the North Iowa Research Center, which holds physical copies of the paper on file at the Central Iowa Regional Library in Mason City.
The third step is understanding the limits of what this source can tell you. The Globe Gazette obituaries generally do not include information about relatives who moved away, childhood addresses outside of Butler County, or details that the family chose to leave out. Some obituaries are one paragraph long. Others run two or three columns. The longer entries tend to appear for people who were well-established in the community or who lived long enough to accumulate significant organizational memberships. A short notice is not necessarily a sign of an incomplete family record. It is often just a family that did not want to spend money on a long notice. Newspaper obituaries are priced by the line or by the column inch, so length is directly tied to cost. If you are doing serious research, the most practical approach combines the microfilm at SHSI, the physical files at the Central Iowa Regional Library, and the online databases. Start with the online search to identify candidates, then verify on microfilm. The microfilm reader-printers at SHSI cost $0.10 per page and you can take scans. The process usually takes about three to five hours for a single lineage if you are thorough, compared to eight or nine hours if you rely entirely on online databases and end up chasing false matches. There is no substitute for seeing the original layout, because the placement of an obituary in the paper can indicate whether it was a family-sponsored notice or a newspaper-paid tribute, and that distinction affects how much detail you should expect to find.
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