Accessing Lorain Journal Death Notices Through Unlocking the Past
If you've been digging into Ohio genealogy, you've probably run into the Lorain Journal. It's the main paper for Lorain County, and it ran death notices and obituaries for decades. The problem is, most of it isn't sitting in a clean, searchable database somewhere. You have to go get it yourself, and Unlocking the Past is one of the ways to do that if you've got physical or scanned copies. Here's how this actually works in practice. You'll need the Unlocking the Past software installed on your machine, which costs around $60-80 depending on the package and any sales they're running. Then you need the source material - either the actual microfilm from a local library, newspaper clippings from a family member's scrapbook, or digitized PDFs you've pulled from Ancestry or FamilySearch. Unlocking the Past doesn't come with pre-loaded newspaper databases you can just query. It's more of a workspace where you bring your own images and make them searchable through OCR and indexing.
Unlocking The Past A Comprehensive Guide To Lorain Journal Death Notices
The workflow looks like this. You import your images - whether that's TIFFs from microfilm scans or JPEGs from digitized pages - into the program. Then you run the built-in OCR, which uses ABBYY FineReader technology to convert the text. After that, you build a custom index. For death notices specifically, you'd want to index fields like the deceased person's full name, date of death, age, surviving family members, and the funeral home listed. The Lorain Journal usually included all of that in their standard death notice format, which makes indexing relatively straightforward once you've figured out the layout patterns. I hit a wall early on with the OCR because the Lorain Journal printed their death notices in a very narrow two-column format, and the older issues from the 1970s and earlier had that slightly faded newsprint quality that OCR struggles with. The software would regularly confuse "Luther" for "Luther" or miss whole lines when the column break happened mid-sentence. My workaround was to do the initial OCR pass, then manually correct the problematic pages before building the index. It added maybe 20 minutes per 50 pages, but it made the difference between a search returning zero results and actually finding the right person. I also learned to lower the OCR confidence threshold in the settings - the default is pretty aggressive about rejecting uncertain text, and lowering it caught a lot of the faded print that would otherwise be invisible to your searches later. One thing people don't usually expect is how much time the indexing phase takes. If you're importing 5,000 pages of Lorain Journal death notices, don't budget an afternoon. Budget a weekend. The OCR on a modern machine will process a page in about 3-5 seconds, but the manual correction step - which I can't stress enough that you shouldn't skip - adds significant time. I ended up spending roughly 4-6 hours on a collection of about 2,000 pages that I knew was mostly clean because a previous researcher had done some basic work on it. A fresh batch from microfilm? Expect double that for the same number of pages.
There's a limitation worth being upfront about. Unlocking the Past is excellent at what it does - it's one of the better local genealogy databases you can build yourself - but it's not going to connect you with other researchers' work on the Lorain Journal. Unlike something like Newspapers.com or even the free Chronicling America project, your database stays on your machine. If you find a relative in a death notice who also appears in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, you have to build that connection yourself. The software doesn't do cross-database matching. Some people see this as a feature because your data stays private. Most of the time it's just an inconvenience. Another practical detail: the Lorain Journal changed its death notice format over the years. Pre-1980 notices tend to be shorter, more structured blocks of text with the basics. Post-1990 notices sometimes include longer biographical sketches, especially for older residents or people who held public positions. When you're building your index fields, plan for both formats. I ended up creating a flexible "additional text" field where I could dump the biographical sections without trying to force them into structured name and date fields. It made the initial setup slower but saved me from having to rebuild the index later when I realized how inconsistent the formats were. For sourcing the actual images, your best bet is the Lorain Public Library's local history room. They have the microfilm going back to the paper's founding in 1868, and they allow on-site scanning with your own camera or scanner. You'll need to bring an SD card or USB drive. The library staff are generally helpful but won't do the scanning for you. Another option is the Northeast Ohio Genealogical Society, which has some digitized portions of the Lorain Journal in their collection. If you're not local to Ohio, FamilySearch has some microfilm records available through their catalog - check the call numbers for the Lorain Journal specifically, as not all years are filmed.
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Once your database is built, the search functionality is where the real value shows up. You can do boolean searches across your indexed fields, which means you can track a family across multiple death notices by searching for surnames and cross-referencing surviving relatives' names. I found a third-cousin relationship that way by noticing that the same set of children appeared as survivors in two different death notices five years apart - something that would have taken forever to spot scrolling through paper pages. The software does support exporting your data in GEDCOM format, which is useful if you want to move your index into Family Tree Builder or another genealogy program. The export isn't perfect - some of the custom fields I created didn't map cleanly to standard GEDCOM tags - but it's serviceable. I ended up doing a light cleanup pass in Excel after the export to make sure all the names and dates aligned correctly before importing into my main family tree. Bottom line: Unlocking the Past is a solid tool for this kind of project if you're willing to put in the upfront work of building and maintaining your own database. It's not a shortcut. But once you have the Lorain Journal death notices indexed and searchable, it's genuinely faster than flipping through microfilm or scrolling through unsearchable PDFs. I'd estimate that a well-indexed personal database cuts research time for Lorain County genealogy projects by about 60-70 percent compared to the alternative methods. That's not a small number when you're trying to verify a single birth date across multiple sources.
