How to Actually Use the Quad City Times Obituary Archive
The Quad City Times has been publishing the Des Moines area since 1867, which means their obituary section contains nearly two centuries of genealogical data for people in eastern Iowa and western Illinois. If you are trying to trace a family line that lived in Davenport, Rock Island, Moline, or the surrounding towns, the digital archive is one of the better regional newspaper collections you can access, but it is not as straightforward as most people assume. Most of the obituaries from roughly the late 1990s onward are digitized and searchable on the Quad City Times website. They are behind a paywall for full access, but you do not need a newspaper subscription to use most genealogy platforms that carry this archive. Newspapers.com has the bulk of the collection, and Ancestry carries it too. The difference is that Newspapers.com has a better search interface specifically for newspaper clippings, while Ancestry lets you connect an obituary record to your family tree more easily. I spent three days last month trying to track down an obituary for a great-uncle who died in 1974. The digital database only had a placeholder entry with a death date and a note that said the full text was on microfilm. The exact workaround was to call the Quad City Times archives department directly at (563) 326-7200. I gave them the name, approximate date of death, and the cemetery where he was buried. They pulled the microfilm, found the obituary, and emailed me a PDF scan of the page within about four business days. It cost nothing and required no subscription. That phone call saved me a trip to the local historical society.
What the Obits Actually Contain
A typical Quad City Times obituary from the 1980s through today usually includes the full name, age at death, date and place of death, a brief biographical paragraph, surviving family members, and the funeral home or cremation service that handled arrangements. Pre-1980 obituaries are shorter and often miss the surviving relatives list entirely. The ones that do survive from before 1960 are almost always in the format of a brief notice rather than the fuller life-story pieces that became common in the late twentieth century. Here is something most people miss. The funeral home attribution at the bottom of an obituary is often more useful than the biographical text. In my research I ran into a case where the obituary mentioned three siblings but gave no addresses. The funeral home listed was J.E. Wiegman & Sons in Moline. A quick lookup of their archived client records showed which family members had used them around that same period, and that triangulation helped me confirm a relationship that the obituary itself left ambiguous.
Common Pitfalls When Searching
Name variations will trip you up. Some obituaries list the middle name, some do not. A person who went by "Robert James Smith" in his twenties might be listed as "Jim Smith" or "Rob Smith" in an obituary decades later. I learned this the hard way when I could not find my grandmother's sister. Her obituary was under "Margaret A. Kowalski" but her driver's license and social security records all used "Marge." She married a man whose last name was different from her birth name, which meant searching under just the maiden name would miss it entirely. Another problem is the date mismatch. The date printed on an obituary is the date of publication, which is almost always one or two days after the actual date of death. If you cross-reference with a death certificate, make sure you are not comparing the wrong date. I wasted several hours once thinking a record belonged to a different person because I did not account for that gap. The biggest limitation is coverage gaps. The digital archive is incomplete for the years between approximately 1920 and 1970. Many pages from that era were never digitized, and some that exist are blurry or missing content at the edges. If your ancestor died during those years and the online record is just a skeletal notice, you need to plan for a physical visit to the Scott County Public Library in Davenport or the Rock Island County Historical Society. Both hold the microfilm copies, but they have different hours and access policies. The Scott County library requires a library card for in-house use, while the Rock Island society allows on-site viewing with a small daily fee.
Get the Full Details
Practical Steps for Getting Results
Start with a broad search on Newspapers.com using the person's full name and the county where they likely died. Filter by date range to within a six-month window of the known or estimated death date. If the result is a placeholder or a partial notice, move to Ancestry and run the same search to see if they have a different scan or a linked family tree entry that fills in gaps. After that, call the Times archives. They are the fastest way to get around the digitization gaps. If you are doing a deep family history project rather than a quick lookup, budget about two to three hours per branch of the family. That includes the database searches, the phone call to the archives, and the cross-referencing of funeral home and cemetery records. I have found that the entire process typically yields enough material to fill a detailed timeline of a person's life within that time frame, provided they lived in the Quad Cities area for at least five years. There is no free shortcut through this. You will either spend money on a subscription to Newspapers.com or Ancestry, or you will spend the time making phone calls and visiting archives. Most people who try to do this for free end up frustrated because the incomplete digitized records give false confidence that the information is missing when it is really just sitting on a shelf somewhere.
