Working With Local Obituary Archives
PressConnects is the online home of the Watertown Daily Times, covering southeastern Wisconsin. The site has been running obituaries for years, and they built a search interface that actually works decently for genealogy work. Most people don't realize how much useful detail sits in those pages beyond the basic biographical data. I've spent a lot of time digging through these records. Not because I'm a historian, but because my grandmother's side of the family goes back to the 1880s in Jefferson County, and the paper files at the local archive are a mess. Digital records are infinitely better, even with their quirks.
Uncovering The Untold Stories Exploring Obituaries On Wwwpressconnectscom
Start by going straight to pressconnects.com/obituaries. The search page lets you filter by last name, date range, and sometimes city. The date range tool is where most people get tripped up. The default is usually "last 30 days," which is useless if you're researching anything older than a month. Change that to "All Dates" before you do anything else. I still see people complaining they can't find records from 2018 when they never bothered to adjust the filter. One thing the site does well is cross-referencing. If someone mentions a surviving spouse who died earlier, PressConnects sometimes links those obituaries together. You won't always find this link, but it's there occasionally, and it saves you from having to do a separate search. I found three connections this way last year that I would have missed otherwise. The search results page shows a snippet of text below each listing. Those snippets often contain details not in the main article - things like employer names, military service branch, or church affiliation. Don't click through immediately. Scan the snippets first. You can cut your time in half just by reading what's visible before opening anything.
Here's the edge case nobody warns you about: misspellings. PressConnects indexes exactly what was published. If the funeral home submitted an obituary with a typo in the surname, that's what gets indexed. I spent two weeks looking for a "Kozlowski" record that turned out to be filed as "Kozolowski" because the daughter who placed the ad had trouble with the spelling. My workaround was using Soundex-style searches. The site doesn't have a Soundex button, but if you try alternate phonetic spellings of the last name - Kozlowsky, Kozloski, even just Koziol - you'll often surface the right record. It takes patience, but it works.
Get the Full Details
What You Can Actually Find Beyond Names and Dates
Most people treat obituaries as death notices. That's a waste. The detailed ones, especially the paid full-length versions, contain information that standard genealogy databases don't have. Birth locations for parents. The name of the high school someone graduated from. Which brother moved to Arizona and which sister stayed in Wisconsin. These details fill gaps that census records and birth certificates simply can't cover. The military section is particularly useful. PressConnects flags or includes VA benefit information in many obituaries. I've pulled discharge dates, rank, and even specific unit assignments from these pages that weren't showing up in my Ancestry searches. For veterans who served before digital records were kept, this is sometimes the only accessible source. Surnames that appear repeatedly in the surviving family listings give you another generation of connections. If three different obituaries from different decades all mention the same cousin's name, that's a thread you can pull. I traced a great-uncle I'd never heard of because his name appeared as a survivor in four separate obituaries across a twelve-year span.
The Limits of This Approach
PressConnects only covers Dodge, Jefferson, and Walworth counties in Wisconsin. If your family is from Milwaukee or Chicago, this site won't help you. The coverage area is straightforward but restrictive. You'll need to branch out to other papers like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or the Chicago Tribune for broader regions. Another limitation: the digitization is incomplete for older records. PressConnects has been online since the late 1990s, and most obituaries from 1998 onward are searchable. Records before that tend to be scattered. Some are microfilmed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and a few have been selectively digitized by third-party services, but there's no comprehensive pre-1998 search available here. If you're working with ancestors who died before 1998, plan on visiting the local library archives or ordering microfilm reproductions. The search interface also has a character limit on the name field. I ran into this when searching for hyphenated surnames like "VanDerHeyden." The system cut off part of the name and returned zero results. The fix is to search for just the primary surname and then filter by the first name manually. It's slower, but it gets you past the bug.
Finally, the site doesn't allow bulk downloads or API access. If you're doing serious research and need to scrape or compile large datasets, you're out of luck. Everything has to be done by hand, one record at a time. This isn't a technical limitation of your computer - it's how the site is built, and it's unlikely to change. The most practical workflow I've settled on is opening three browser tabs: the PressConnects obituary search, a notes document, and a spreadsheet for tracking connections. I copy key details directly from each obituary into the sheet as I go. It takes longer than automated tools would, but the manual process forces you to actually read the content instead of skimming. The extra time usually pays off because I catch small details - a middle initial, a maiden name, a town I hadn't considered - that a faster method would have skipped over.
