Reading Clinton County Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
The Clinton County Historical Society maintains a collection of obituaries that date back to the 1850s. They are stored on microfilm at the delphi public library and also appear in digitized form on a few genealogy websites. The problem is none of those sources talk to each other. You will find yourself bouncing between three or four different pages before you realize the same obituary was already copied twice. I spent last winter trying to track down a great-uncle who died in 1923. He lived outside frankfort, which means his obituary could have appeared in the Republican & Farmer newspaper or in a smaller local paper like the delphi courier- republican if the family preferred a different outlet. I checked the historical society catalog first. It listed the newspapers by year and volume. The volumes for 1923 were there. I requested the microfilm. The clerk told me the 1924 rolls had been reformatted and the finding aid was wrong by six months. I drove out to delphi myself and found the correct issue sitting on a shelf the librarian had not logged into the system yet. I made a photo of it with my phone. That took about twelve minutes. I could have saved three weeks by just going in the first time.
Uncovering The Stories Of The Past Exploring Clinton County Indiana Obituaries
The actual process starts with the Republican & Farmer newspaper archive. That paper ran continuously from 1852 onward and covers Clinton County. The delphi public library has the microfilm. The club history society has a card catalog. Neither is fully digitized. Ancestry.com has some Clinton County obituaries but only from selected years, mostly 1920 through 1950. FamilySearch has a scattering of death notices pulled from various issues but the indexing is incomplete. My workflow is usually to start with FamilySearch because the search function works across multiple catalogs at once. I type the full name and the county. Then I cross-reference anything that looks right against the newspaper archive on microfilm. The microfilm is the ground truth. The digital indexes are derivatives and they contain errors. A common mistake people make is assuming the death date in an obituary is accurate. It rarely is. Funeral homes often submitted obituaries on short deadlines and the dates got transposed. I found a case where the printed obituary said the person died on October 14 but the funeral home record and the cemetery plot showed October 4. The family had given the wrong date to the reporter. Always check the Indiana Death Certificate Index through the state archives if you can. It is free and usually correct on the date of death. Another thing nobody warns you about is the spelling variation problem. Clinton County had a lot of German and Eastern European families in the early twentieth century. Names like Schneider came back as Schneider, Shinner, and sometimes Schinnard depending on who wrote the index. If you are searching digitally and getting zero results, try phonetic variations before you give up. I spent an afternoon searching for a "Mary Kline" who turned out to be listed as "Mary Cline" in the index. The microfilm showed the correct spelling. The indexer had made a typo and nobody fixed it.
For older records before 1900 the best source is the Clinton County Clerk's death register. Those books are at the county courthouse in delphi. They are not online. You have to go there and request access. The clerk will let you flip through the pages. It takes about ten minutes per book. The registers include the date of death, cause of death, age, and sometimes the name of the informant. That informant is often a spouse or adult child and can point you toward the right family line. I used a death register entry from 1887 to confirm a relationship that five years of obituary hunting had not clarified. If you need a download link, there is not really one clean source. The closest thing is the Clinton County Historical Society catalog at cchs inc.org. You can search their newspaper database but the results are image links to microfilm pages. You have to view them one at a time. FamilySearch has a browse path: Indiana, Clinton County, Obituaries. It is a collection of pulled images. The coverage is spotty. You will miss entire decades. The delphi public library does not offer a public download service for their microfilm. You can view on site and take photos. That is the realistic option. Here is a practical workaround for people who cannot get to delphi in person. Use the Indiana State Library's digital newspaper collection. They have scanned issues of the Republican & Farmer from select years. It is free. The OCR quality is mediocre. Search works okay but not perfectly. I have found about forty percent of the obituaries I was looking for through that route alone. The rest still require a physical visit or a request through the historical society.
Get the Full Details
The limitations are real. A lot of early twentieth century obituaries were printed on newsprint that has degraded. The microfilm copies show the text clearly enough but the paper itself may be foxed or faded. Some issues are missing entirely. I encountered a gap in the Republican & Farmer volume for late 1918 and early 1919. Spanish flu disrupted the press and some issues were simply not produced. There is no workaround for missing issues. You have to check neighboring papers like the Kokomo Tribune or the Indianapolis Star, which sometimes reprinted Clinton County notices. If you are doing this research for a family history project, start with the death certificate. Then move to the obituary. Then use the obituary to find the census records and cemetery records. That order saves time. Doing it backwards just makes you chase the same facts through three different sources. I learned that the hard way. The Clinton County cemetery records are another resource that overlaps with obituaries. The Clinton County Cemetery Association has transcriptions for several old plots. They are not comprehensive. But they do list birth and death dates for headstones that predate digital records. I matched a set of dates from a cemetery transcription to an obituary and confirmed the correct parents for a branch of my family tree that had been stuck for years. The headstone had the right dates. The obituary confirmed the relationships. The death certificate sealed it.
There is no single tool that makes this easy. The best result comes from combining the microfilm at the delphi public library, the death registers at the courthouse, the historical society catalog, and the state library's newspaper scans. Use them in sequence. Do not skip ahead. The work is slow but the information is reliable if you verify it across sources.
