Tracing Local History Through Old Obituaries
I spent about three weeks last winter digging through the Lancaster Historical Society's database, trying to find a great-uncle who died in 1954. Most of my time was wasted because nobody had indexed the Sheridan Funeral Home records from that era. You learn quickly that the work is mostly about patience, not cleverness. The Sheridan Funeral Home was established in 1898 and has been the primary memorial provider for Lancaster County for well over a century. Their obituary archives hold details you won't find in newspapers — addresses, surviving siblings, union memberships, church positions, the name of the local boarding house where someone lived before their death. These are the details that turn a genealogical dead end into a lead. The physical archives sit on the second floor of the funeral home on North Queen Street. They maintain handwritten ledgers from 1902 to 1978, plus microfilm copies of newspaper announcements that were submitted by the home itself. The digital collection is smaller. Only records from 1995 onward have been fully digitized, and even then, the images are low-resolution scans that require good lighting and a zoom lens on your phone to read small type.
I found the one concrete workaround after hitting a wall with the 1963 to 1972 gap. The microfilm reader at the Lancaster County Recorder of Deeds office had a different roll — they'd picked up the remainder of the microfilm series that Sheridan never digitized. This took me two months to discover because the staff at both locations assumed the other had the material. I ended up copying 84 pages by hand using my camera's video mode and a black notebook cover as background contrast. The text came out legible after I ran it through Tesseract OCR with the --psm 6 flag. That gave me a searchable text file for what was previously invisible. The ledger books themselves contain information that the printed obituaries omit. They list the undertaker's fee, the plot number in the cemetery, sometimes a notation like "viewing delayed due to illness in family" which tells you something about the cause of death without ever saying it outright. I spent a Tuesday afternoon cross-referencing plot numbers against Maple Grove Cemetery records and confirmed that three entries in the ledger matched unmarked pauper graves that the county had repossessed in 1981. There are limitations worth noting before you invest serious time. The Sheridan collection has known gaps around 1918 due to the influenza epidemic — several weeks of records simply don't exist, likely destroyed during the overflow of deaths that overwhelmed the building's capacity. Another blind spot is the period from roughly 1941 to 1945 when many families chose to use funeral homes in neighboring towns to avoid the heightened visibility of wartime mourning. If you're researching someone who died during those years and can't find a Sheridan record, check the Ephrata or Mount Joy facilities before giving up.
The most useful thing you can do before visiting is print out the index cards from the 1980s onward. These are available through the Lancaster Public Library's genealogy terminal and give you names, dates, and a shorthand location code that tells you whether the record is in the ledger book, the newspaper microfilm, or both. Without these cards, you'll spend your first visit wandering aisles with no direction. I also learned the hard way that the funeral home doesn't release pre-1950 records without a documented familial relationship or a research letter from an accredited historian. Bring a copy of whatever proof you have — a birth certificate, a census record, a previous obituary that names the deceased as a relative. They'll make a photocopy and send it back to you, but they'll keep the originals. One person at the front desk told me that policies are stricter now because a documentary crew tried to pull records in 2019 without proper credentials, and the home tightened its access rules afterward. What makes these archives valuable beyond genealogy is the social history they preserve. The obituaries from the 1920s and 1930s frequently mention farm equipment, livestock, and crop yields as part of a person's life summary — information that agricultural historians find more reliable than census data for understanding small-scale farming in the region. A 1932 entry for a farmer in Mount Joy Township lists "42 dairy cows, 18 acres tobacco, one Ford Model A" alongside the standard survivors and service details. That kind of detail doesn't survive in any other single source.
Get the Full Details
If you're starting a project like this, budget about forty hours for a complete pass through the 1900-to-1940 range for a single family line. The index cards will cut that in half if you use them properly, but reading the actual ledgers by hand is unavoidable for the years before digitization. The most efficient workflow I found was to photograph each page with a flatbed scanner app at 600 DPI, batch-process the images with a simple contrast enhancement, and then run OCR in bulk. That gets you to about fifteen minutes per page once you've calibrated the settings. There is no downloadable full-text database for the pre-1995 period. Anyone claiming to sell you one is selling something unofficial, possibly incomplete, and possibly based on material they photographed without authorization. The funeral home has been firm about this since 2016 when a commercial genealogy site posted scans of their ledgers and received a cease-and-desist. Stick to on-site research or the library's microfilm copies if you want to stay on the right side of things. For the years after 1995, the home maintains an online memorial page that includes some transcribed text, but the transcription is inconsistent. Names of spouses are sometimes misspelled, dates are occasionally off by a year, and the "read more" expansion hides the full obituary behind a click that the archive search function doesn't index properly. I've found entries that existed in the digital archive but didn't appear in search results because the system only indexes the visible portion of the page, not the expanded text.
The best single source for comprehensive coverage remains the Lancaster Daily News obituary section from 1950 onward, because Sheridan submitted their notices directly to the paper. The news archive is searchable through the library's ProQuest subscription, and the full-text search catches variants in spelling that the funeral home's own database misses. I used this to locate an entry for my great-uncle that the Sheridan index listed under "J. Miller" instead of "John Miller" — a difference that cost me four hours before I noticed the discrepancy. Maple Grove Cemetery's interment records are another piece of the puzzle. The cemetery office keeps a separate register that sometimes lists burial location within the plot, cremation status, and whether the grave was later sold to another family. This isn't public information in most jurisdictions, but Maple Grove treats it as a research resource for descendants. I requested my own family's records there and got a typed summary of three generations of interments, including a notation that one plot had been purchased twice due to a clerical error in 1967. That's the kind of mundane detail that only shows up when you look at the paperwork from multiple angles. If you're new to this, start with the death certificates from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. They're available through a standard request form and take about three weeks to process. The certificate gives you the exact date of death, the attending physician, and the informant's relationship to the deceased — usually the person who filed the funeral arrangements. Cross-reference that date with the Sheridan ledger and you'll know immediately whether a record exists for that person. If the ledger entry is missing, it confirms one of the known gaps or suggests the body was handled by another provider.
The work is slow, the sources are fragmented, and the access rules change without much notice. But the records are there, and they're detailed enough to reconstruct entire neighborhoods from the death announcements alone. I've traced five separate family lines using nothing but Sheridan obituaries and cemetery cross-references, and every single one turned up at least one piece of information that wasn't in any other collection. That's why I keep going back.
