What You're Actually Looking At
The Press and Sunbulletin is the primary newspaper serving Binghamton, New York and the surrounding Broome County area. Their obituary section runs daily and has been publishing death notices since the paper was established. If you are trying to research family history in this area, these records are one of the few decent sources available for deaths going back several decades. Most people don't realize the paper was actually formed from a merger. The Binghamton Press and the Binghamton Sun merged their operations at different points in the twentieth century, and the obituary records carry that overlap. Archives from before the merger may be filed differently than later records, and you will notice style changes in the notices themselves if you look at enough of them over time.
Unlocking The Treasure Trove Of History Exploring The World Of Press And Sunbulletin Binghamton Ny Obituaries
I have spent more hours than I want to admit digging through these archives. Here is how the process actually works and where it falls apart. The Press and Sunbulletin is owned by GateHouse Media, which later became part of Gannett. Gannett operates the Encompass archive platform, which is what you will use to search digitized versions of the paper. The basic path is straightforward: go to the Encompass site, search for "Press and Sunbulletin," and filter by the obituary section. The archive goes back to around 1996 for full digitized texts. Before that, you are dealing with microfilm or card catalogs if you can get to the local library. The library route is the Broome County Public Library on Court Street in Binghamton. They have microfilm readers and a reference desk that can pull specific issues. This matters because some early 1990s obituaries exist only on microfilm and have not been scanned into the digital archive. If your person died between 1990 and 1996, plan on a physical visit or asking the library to make copies.
I ran into a specific problem last year when researching a great aunt who died in 1994. Her obituary listed a funeral home that no longer exists and a pastor whose full name was not included in the digital version. The Encompass search only showed the shortened text. I ended up calling the library, having them pull the original microfilm issue, and the full text had the pastor's complete name and the exact service time. It took about forty minutes of phone calls and an interlibrary loan request that cost me twelve dollars for the scans. Worth it.
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What You Will Find In These Records
A standard Press and Sunbulletin obituary from the past two decades typically includes the full name of the deceased, age, date of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, funeral home, and service details. Some include a brief biography paragraph. The depth varies considerably depending on who wrote it and how much the family paid for the notice, since print obituaries are sold by the line or column inch. Earlier notices, particularly from the 1970s and 1980s, tend to be shorter and more formulaic. They often list surviving children and grandchildren but skip the biographical detail. Birth dates are sometimes omitted entirely in older records, which is a real problem for genealogy work. You might find a death date and a list of survivors but no birth year, forcing you to estimate age from other sources. The paper also publishes death certificates through the New York State Department of Health, but those are separate from the newspaper obituaries. The obituary is a public notice placed by the family or funeral home. The death certificate is a government record. They sometimes contradict each other on dates or names, and I have seen cases where the obituary had a misspelled middle name that the certificate did not. Always treat them as independent sources.
Common Problems And How To Work Around Them
The biggest issue people hit is name variations. Spelling was not standardized in obituary submissions, and typists made errors. If you cannot find an ancestor, try common misspellings of the surname and variation in first name spelling. "John" might appear as "Jon" or "Jno." in older records. Middle names are frequently dropped or used as first names without warning. Date formatting changed over the years. Pre-2000 obituaries sometimes use abbreviated months or numeric formats that the search indexing handles poorly. A search for "March 1987" might miss an entry formatted as "3/15/87" depending on how the archive indexed that particular issue. Another issue is that some obituaries were published in both the morning and evening editions on the same day with slightly different text. The Encompass platform may not always flag both versions, so you can end up with duplicate results or miss one entirely. If a search returns only one result for a death you know was widely covered, try expanding the date range by two days in each direction and filtering manually.
I also found that surname changes due to marriage create gaps. A woman who died under her maiden name might have been listed under her married name in the obituary, or vice versa. Cross-referencing with census records and marriage certificates before searching helps narrow this down.
Tips That Actually Matter
Start with the death date rather than the name if you are doing broad research. The obituary usually appears within one to three days of death, so a tight date range dramatically reduces the noise in your search results. Running a name-only search for a common surname like Smith or Johnson in this region will return hundreds of irrelevant results and waste considerable time. The newspaper's own website sometimes hosts recent obituaries that have not yet made it into the Encompass archive. If you are researching someone who died within the last five years, check the Press and Sunbulletin site directly before relying solely on the archive. The web version occasionally includes photos and longer biographical content that the archive scan may not capture fully. For pre-1996 records, the Binghamton Historical Society holds additional clippings and index files that are not part of the official newspaper archive. They are not digitized. A visit or a mailed request to their contact address is the only way to access those materials. They maintain a subject file index that covers deaths from the 1960s onward, organized by surname. This index can tell you the exact date and page number of an obituary, which saves you from browsing microfilm blind.
Limitations You Need To Accept
These archives are incomplete. Not every death in Broome County receives a newspaper obituary. People who died without family, who were not well connected, or whose families could not afford to place a notice simply do not appear in the records. The archive also does not cover the entire state, only the Binghamton metropolitan area and nearby towns that subscribe to the paper. If your ancestor died in a nearby county like Chenango or Tioga, their obituary may have appeared in a different newspaper entirely. The Encompass platform has search glitches. Characters like hyphens and apostrophes in surnames are sometimes dropped by the indexing system, causing matches to fail silently. I have seen entries where "O'Brien" returned zero results but "OBrien" returned the correct page. Running searches with and without special characters is a small step that catches these failures. If you need comprehensive coverage beyond what this newspaper provides, you will need to supplement with New York State Death Certificates through the Department of Health, Social Security Death Index records, and cemetery records from the Broome County Clerk's office. No single source covers everything.
A Practical Search Workflow
Begin by confirming the death date from a secondary source like a family Bible record, cemetery marker, or Social Security death index. Then search Encompass with a three-day window around that date. Pull the full obituary text and note the funeral home and surviving relatives. Use the funeral home name to search for other family members who may have used the same provider. Check the library microfilm for any notices predating 1996. Cross-reference the surviving family list against census records to verify relationships. This sequence typically takes between forty-five minutes and two hours depending on how complete the initial death date information is. The Press and Sunbulletin obituaries are a solid foundation for Broome County genealogy work. They are not complete, they have indexing gaps, and they require some familiarity with the archive system to use efficiently. But for the area they cover, they are among the best publicly accessible death records available, and they save you from spending weeks at a microfilm reader if you know what you are doing.
