So You Want to Dig Into Evansville's Obituary Archives
The Courier Press has been publishing obituaries in Evansville, Indiana since the late 1800s. If you're trying to piece together family history or just understand what the city looked like at different points in time, those old newspaper pages are one of the most useful resources you'll find. The catch is that they aren't neatly organized anywhere. You have to know where to look and what you're actually looking at. I've spent years pulling obituaries for people and finding that the digitized versions online are a mess. Genealogy.com has some of them, Newspapers.com has more, and the Vanderburgh Public Library actually has physical microfilm that goes back further than anything digitized. But here's the thing nobody tells you: the Courier Press changed publishers and ownership several times, and the format of obituaries shifted with each transition. A 1920s obit looks nothing like a 1980s one, and if you're searching with keyword tools designed for modern layouts, you'll miss half of what you need. The library has microfilm readers on-site. I recommend going in person if you can. The digital scans are often low resolution, and the OCR text they produce is unreliable for anything before 1950. When I was tracking down a great-uncle who died in 1938, I found his obit on microfilm in about ten minutes. The same search on Newspapers.com came up empty because the scan had a smudge right over the surname. The actual newspaper page was perfectly readable on the microfilm reader. That's a real-world example of why the physical archives still matter.
If you're doing this remotely, Newspapers.com is your best starting point. They have the largest collection of Courier Press issues, though coverage is spotty between 1940 and 1960. The 1942 obituaries from March through September are missing entirely from their database. I learned this the hard way after wasting three hours searching for someone I knew died in April of that year. The Vanderburgh Public Library's own digitized collection fills some of that gap, but it's incomplete too. So you end up bouncing between sources. One counter-intuitive thing about these obituaries: they weren't always written by the newspaper. Families submitted paid notices, and the quality varies enormously. A well-off family in the 1950s might commission a full-page biographical sketch. A working-class family in the Depression era might have managed a two-inch notice that just lists names and service times. Don't assume a shorter obit means the person wasn't important to their community. The size of the notice tells you about the family's money, not their life. Another detail that trips people up is that the Courier Press merged content from other local papers over the years. If an ancestor died in a nearby town like Newburgh or Boonville, their obit might still appear in the Courier Press if the family had connections to Evansville. I found a grandmother's obit that I almost missed because I only searched the Evansville city limits and she actually lived in Henderson County, just across the river in Kentucky. Her service was held in Evansville, which is why it ran there.
The physical archives at the Vanderburgh Public Library are located on the second floor of the main branch downtown. They have microfilm for the Courier Press going back to 1886, though some early years have gaps. The staff can help you find the reels, but they don't do research for you. Bring a notebook. The microfilm readers don't allow photography, but you can take notes on what you find. I usually copy down the date, page number, and any details that aren't in the obit itself — things like the name of the funeral home, which gives you leads for cemetery records, or mentions of surviving relatives that aren't directly connected to you. If you want to go further, the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library also has city directories and marriage records that cross-reference well with obituaries. A lot of people stop at the obit and miss the chance to verify dates against other documents. I once spent weeks trying to figure out if two people with the same name in different obituaries were the same person. The answer came from a marriage record filed twenty years earlier that I never would have found without the obit names as a starting point. One more thing worth noting: the Courier Press stopped printing full obituaries in many cases around 2010 and moved them to an online-only format. The transition wasn't clean. A lot of those early online-only notices weren't archived properly, and they're gone now. If you're researching someone who died between 2010 and 2015, you might find fragments on Facebook memorials or funeral home websites, but the original newspaper record is likely gone. That's a genuine gap in the historical record, and it's something researchers are only starting to understand.
Get the Full Details
For the most part, the older material is solid. The microfilm is well-preserved, the indexes are usable, and the content is generally accurate for its time. Just don't treat an obit as a complete biography. It's a snapshot, often written under time pressure by someone who may not have known all the details. Cross-reference with census records, Social Security death indexes, and cemetery records when you can. The obituary is the door, not the whole house. Newspapers.com has the most accessible digitized collection if you can't get to the library. Vanderburgh Public Library offers free access to their microfilm collection during library hours. Either way, start with what you know and work outward. The records will tell you more than you expect if you give them the chance.
