Why You Should Be Digging Through Newspaper Obituaries for Local History
The Pottstown Mercury has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, which means there is a dense, relatively untapped archive sitting right there if you are doing genealogy or local history work in Montgomery County and surrounding areas. Most people treat obits as a formality. They are not. A well-written obit from the 1920s through the 1970s will give you dates, family connections, military service, church affiliations, employer names, and sometimes even the specific street address where the person lived. That is six data points in three paragraphs that you would otherwise spend weeks chasing down through census records and court filings. Here is how I actually use these things when I am building out a family line or researching a local topic. I start at the Mercury's online archive, which is accessible through subscription services like Newspapers.com or directly through the Pottstown Mercury's own digitized holdings if your library provides access. For older material before the widespread digitization effort around 2018, you often have to go through microfilm at the Montgomery County Historical Society or the Pottstown branch of the Montgomery County Library system. The physical paper runs are actually more complete than the digital versions for certain years because some smaller funeral home submissions from the 1950s and earlier never made it into the early digital scans. The search workflow matters more than most people realize. Do not just search by the person's full name. Search by first name plus a rough year range, then scan the results manually. Last names get misspelled constantly in older typeset work. I once spent two hours looking for a "Margaret Kline" who turned out to be indexed under "Klyn" because the original typesetter made a judgment call. Also cross-reference with funeral home publications. Many families submitted duplicate text to the Mercury and to smaller regional papers like the Ephrata Gazette or the Reading Eagle. The versions sometimes differ slightly because each paper ran their own editor's cuts.
When I'm compiling data from a batch of obituaries, I pull the information into a spreadsheet with columns for full name, date of death, age, birth date (if stated), place of birth, parents' names, spouse, children, siblings, employer, military service, church, and burial location. That last field is critical because it tells you exactly which cemetery to check next. Oakwood Cemetery in Pottstown alone has over 40,000 interments and the Mercury's burial notation usually points you directly to the section and lot number, which saves hours of wandering through rows of headstones looking for the right grave. There is a specific problem that comes up regularly and almost nobody prepares for. Obituaries from the 1940s through the early 1960s frequently list only the surviving children's names, not the deceased's full sibling set. If you are trying to map out a complete family structure, you will hit a wall. The workaround is to look for the spouse's obituary next. Spouses often include a much more complete list of surviving and predeceased family members because the surviving children from both sides typically co-author that version. I found an entire branch of my research locked behind a missing sibling list until I pulled the wife's obit three months later and it named five brothers the earlier notice never mentioned. Another thing that trips people up is assuming the date printed on the obituary is the date of death. It is usually the date of publication, which means the person died one to three days earlier depending on when the funeral home submitted the copy. For vital records work this shift can throw off a timeline enough to make you miss a connection in a different county's death certificate filing. Always note the publication date separately from the death date and flag it for later verification against the actual death certificate if you need precision.
The Mercury's obituary content also changes noticeably across decades in ways that affect research quality. Pre-1960 obits tend to be shorter and more factual, which sounds like a disadvantage but actually makes them more reliable because there is less editorial padding. Post-1980 obituaries often include lengthy biographical essays, career summaries, and personal anecdotes that are valuable for understanding the person's life context but less useful for hard genealogical data because the factual skeleton gets buried under narrative. A 1972 obit might list exactly twelve verifiable facts in five lines while a 2005 obit might cover the same amount of factual ground across eight paragraphs of prose. Learn to parse both styles efficiently. If you are working with the digitized version and run into paywall restrictions, your local public library almost certainly provides free access to Newspapers.com or Ancestry's newspaper collection on their computers. I have never encountered a library in Montgomery County that does not offer this, and the Pottstown branch specifically has a dedicated genealogy workstation with the full Mercury archive searchable by date range. Walk in during weekday mornings and you can usually grab the machine without a wait. The real limitation you need to accept is that the Mercury obituary collection is incomplete for certain populations. African American residents of Pottstown before the 1960s were significantly underrepresented in the newspaper's obituary section due to segregation-era advertising practices and lower rates of funeral home contracts with the paper. If you are researching Black ancestors in the area, the Mercury will only take you so far. You need to supplement with the Black Presbyterian Church records, the St. Paul AME Zion Church burial logs, and the Philadelphia newspaper archives, particularly the Chicago Defender which carried national obituary notices that sometimes covered Pennsylvania residents. No single source covers everyone equally, and pretending otherwise just wastes time.
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Military service notation is another area where the record is uneven. The Mercury started consistently including Veterans Administration designation and service details in the late 1970s. Before that, mentioning "served in World War I" was common but specific rank, unit, and deployment information was rare unless the family specifically requested it. If you need military documentation for a pre-1980 death, do not assume the obit will provide it. Pull the person's WWI or WWII service record directly from the National Archives or use the eVetRec system, then use the obit primarily to confirm the basic fact of service and get the approximate discharge date. One more practical note on preservation. If you find a particularly valuable obituary, do not rely solely on the digital screenshot. Download the full PDF from the archive if the platform allows it, or print the page with the surrounding articles intact. The context matters. Sometimes the neighbor's obituary, published the same week, mentions a shared employer or the same church group, and that adjacent content is just as useful as the primary notice. The PDF preserves that context. A cropped image does not.
