Where to Find Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Obituaries and What to Expect
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, though coverage was uneven before the 1950s. Most people trying to track down a ancestor's death notice run into the same problems on day one: the online archive cuts off at 1995, the free section is incomplete, and the paid databases don't index everything reliably. I spent about three months last year trying to pull together obituary records for a family that lived in the Hill District and Monroeville across several generations. Here is what actually works. Start with the digital archive through GenealogyBank or Ancestry if you want a quick pull. Both platforms have digitized issues of the Post-Gazette, but the indexing quality varies wildly by decade. Pre-1970 issues were originally scanned as images and then later run through OCR, which means searches for older names often miss variations. I found my grandfather's obituary under "William J. Kowalski" but missed two others because the newspaper listed him as "Bill Kowalski" in the body text and the OCR only caught the formal version. I ended up going to the microfilm collection at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Main Branch on William Penn Place because browsing the physical paper let me see the actual layout and catch names the database skipped. The main archival database the Post-Gazette maintains now is accessible through their website, but it requires a subscription that runs roughly $8 to $12 per month. It covers roughly 1995 forward fairly completely. Before that, you are mostly working with the microfilm archives or third-party databases. The Carnegie Library has the most complete collection going back to the 1890s. Some materials there are only available on microfilm and you have to request them at the reference desk, which usually means showing up in person during their reading room hours. Weekday mornings tend to be quieter. I found a 1942 death notice that was not in any online index simply because the library catalog had misfiled the microfilm reel number, so I asked the archivist and she pulled the right reel from the stacks. That saved me about four hours of searching.
For people working with pre-1950 records specifically, here is something most guides do not mention: the Post-Gazette merger history matters more than you might think. Before 1959 the paper was called the Pittsburgh Post and the Pittsburgh Gazette merged into it, which means obituaries from certain neighborhoods and certain time periods can end up under the wrong newspaper name in some indexes. I searched for three different surnames under "Pittsburgh Gazette" and got zero results, then switched to "Pittsburgh Post" and found every single one of them within twenty minutes. The Library of Congress chronicling america project has some issues digitized and searchable for free, but the coverage is spotty and mostly limited to the earliest years. Death certificates from the Pennsylvania State Archives are useful complements but they take time. I submitted a request through the state website and got my copies back in about ten business days. They cost $20 per certificate. The information on them is generally more accurate than the obituary because the obituary is written by a grieving family member who may not know the exact birth date or the mother's maiden name. Obituaries from the Post-Gazette in the 1970s and earlier often list the survivor's name as just "Mrs. John Doe" rather than the woman's actual first name, which makes tracing female ancestors significantly harder. I learned that the hard way when I spent two weeks looking for my great grandmother under her married name before checking the death certificate and finding her birth name listed correctly. If you are trying to find obituaries for people who died in the 1980s and 1990s, FamilySearch sometimes has transcripts uploaded by volunteers that are not indexed anywhere else. It is a hit and miss situation. I found about three useful family group sheets from that era on FamilySearch that referenced Post-Gazette obituaries, but most uploads are incomplete. The paywall structure on genealogy sites is another practical problem: Ancestry charges for full access but GenealogyBank operates on a separate subscription, and neither will cover your research costs. I have access through a local library card that gives me free AncestryLibraryEdition, but that version does not include the full Post-Gazette archive. It covers other newspapers but not always the ones you actually need. Call your county library first and ask specifically what they have before you buy anything.
A quick note on using the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archives for historical research: they do not provide a direct download of raw obituary text in bulk. If you need to extract hundreds of records programmatically, your only realistic option is manual transcription or scraping, which they do not explicitly allow in their terms. Most researchers just copy and paste by hand. I use a simple spreadsheet with columns for name, date of death, date of publication, page number, and a short quote from the text. It takes about eight to twelve minutes per obituary depending on how long the notice is and whether you need to look up cross references. For a typical family line with ten to fifteen death events spread across decades, budget about half a day of focused work if you already know the approximate dates and about two full days if you are working from scratch with limited information. The biggest mistake I see people make with these records is assuming the obituary date is the death date. It is not. The Post-Gazette usually publishes the obituary one to three days after death, but funeral homes sometimes hold notices until the service is complete, which can push the publication date five or six days past the actual date of death. If you are cross referencing with Social Security Death Index records or cemetery records, always account for that gap. It saved me from wrongly placing a death event in the wrong month during one of my family projects. For anyone doing serious research into Pittsburgh area families, especially those connected to industrial neighborhoods like Homestead, Braddock, McKeesport, or the North Side, the Post-Gazette obituaries combined with city directory records and census data will give you a much stronger foundation than any single source alone. I keep all my extracted obituary records in a dedicated folder organized by surname and year, and I scan the relevant newspaper page whenever I can get physical access to the microfilm. Digital images from the microfilm are easier to share and reference later. The Carnegie Library staff are generally helpful if you show up prepared with specific dates and names rather than asking them to search for you, but they will assist if you bring your own request with enough detail to be actionable.
Get the Full Details
If you need a direct link to the Post-Gazette's current archive portal it is through their own website at post-gazette.com archives section, though access requires a subscription. The free resources through local libraries and the State Archives remain the most practical starting point for most people without institutional access.
