Accessing Old Newspaper Records When the Internet Gets in the Way
The Delaware North Company website for Scranton Times archives is one of those sites that looks like it was built in 2003 and never updated. The search function exists. It does what it does. I spent about three weeks figuring out the actual workflow after getting nowhere with the basic search box. Most people trying to access Scranton Times obituaries today hit the same wall: the main search bar only indexes articles from the past five years. Everything before that sits in a digitized archive that requires a different approach entirely. The key is knowing which portal you are actually using.
Unlocking The Past A Deep Dive Into Scranton Times Obituaries Today
The current system splits access into two paths. Path one is the legacy archive through Newspapers.com, which has the bulk of the pre-2015 content. Path two is the Delmarva Future project, which handles more recent digitization work. Neither path is obvious from the homepage. I found this out the hard way after tracking down a death record from 1998. The obituary name was correct. The date was correct. The search returned exactly zero results because the article had been scanned but not yet indexed by the full-text search engine. The image existed. The text behind it did not. I ended up locating it by browsing the microfilm digitization schedule, which listed every issue that had been processed on a rolling basis. The practical workaround for this is straightforward once you know it. Navigate to the archive section directly by URL rather than searching. The URL structure for scanned issues follows a pattern: the year folder, then the month folder, then the individual issue PDF. If you know the approximate date of death, you can usually narrow it down to a two-week window. Searching by obituary tends to fail because many older entries were typeset as photographs, not machine-readable text.
There are three specific databases worth knowing about for this research. The first is the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive, which some county libraries subscribe to. The second is Fold3, which occasionally picks up regional papers that other platforms miss. The third is the local historical society in Lackawanna County, which maintains its own physical collection that overlaps with but does not duplicate the digital records. Here is what nobody tells you about these archives. The date range coverage is inconsistent. Issues from 1972 to 1984 are heavily scanned but sparsely indexed. Issues from 1990 to 2005 are better indexed but have missing pages where the original microfilm was damaged. The worst gap is around the 1977 floods, where a significant number of physical copies were lost and the replacement scans are lower quality. If someone died during or shortly after that period, the digital record may not exist at all. Another thing that trips people up is the naming convention. Scranton Times obituaries from the nineties and early two-thousands often list the deceased by their full legal name, including middle names or maiden names that do not appear in other records. Searching by a nickname or shortened version will return nothing. I wasted two days looking for an obituary under "Robert James Miller" before realizing the paper listed him as "Robert J. Miller." The search engine treats those as completely different strings.
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The subscription model is another friction point. Newspapers.com requires a paid plan for full access, and the free trial period does not include archived obituaries beyond a certain date. The Delmarva Future materials are sometimes available through InterLibrary Loan at public libraries, which means you can access them without paying the commercial subscription. This is not well-publicized. Call your local library reference desk and ask specifically about Delaware North Company newspaper holdings. Most librarians know the process. Some do not, and will send you in circles. If you need obituaries from before 1970, the digital route becomes unreliable. The Digitization Project for the Scranton Times began in earnest in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and anything before that relies on physical microfilm. The university archives at the University of Scranton hold the complete run, but access requires an appointment and you cannot photograph the microfilm directly. You can request scans through their reading room, which takes about ten business days. The most efficient workflow I have found combines all three approaches. Start with the Newspapers.com browse by date, skip the search function entirely. Cross-reference any gaps against the Fold3 collection, which occasionally holds regional papers that Newspapers.com licenses later. For anything completely missing, submit an InterLibrary Loan request through your library citing the specific date and publication. This takes about two weeks but has a high success rate for pre-1990 records.
The main bottleneck is that none of these systems are linked. You cannot export search results across platforms. You cannot batch-download obituaries. Each database has its own login, its own citation format, and its own idea of what constitutes a complete record. Plan on spending at least a few hours compiling what you find if you need a reliable copy. For anyone doing serious genealogical research in the area, I recommend keeping a spreadsheet with columns for source name, archive date, record type, and access method. The data you pull from these sites is unstable. Pages get reindexed. URLs change. A record that is accessible today may be unreachable in six months when the subscription tier shifts or the archiving partner changes. Having a paper trail of exactly where you found each obituary saves you from rediscovering it later.
