How I Actually Go About Digging Into Old Obituaries For Family Lines Like Bostick And Tompkins
Most people approach obituary research the wrong way. They go to Find a Grave first, or they start with Ancestry's death records and assume they've got the full picture. That approach leaves holes in your tree that are hard to patch later. Here's what I actually do when I'm trying to connect living relatives to someone who died in, say, 1932, and the only record you have is a fragmented newspaper clipping. Start with the local newspaper archive for the county where the person died. Not the big national databases. The local ones. I spent three weeks last year tracking down a Tompkins cousin who died in Buncombe County, North Carolina in 1947. Ancestry had the death certificate, sure. But it listed his wife's maiden name as "Mary Ellen" with no surname. The obituary in the Asheville Citizen-Times from November 14th, 1947 named her as Mary Ellen Caudill. That one detail closed off a whole branch I'd been guessing at for years. The method is straightforward but requires patience most people don't have. First, identify the exact county of death from the death certificate or social security death index. Then find what newspapers served that county at the time. Most counties had at least one paper, sometimes two if it was a bigger area. Digitized versions of these papers are scattered across different platforms. Sometimes they're on Newspapers.com. Sometimes they're on the local historical society's website. Sometimes they're on microfilm at the county courthouse that someone scanned poorly and uploaded to Facebook.
I run into a specific problem with obituaries from the 1920s through the 1950s. The printer's type would wear down, especially on common letters like E and T. So names get misread. I had a Bostick ancestor whose obituary listed him as "John Bostic" because the final K had worn out and the typesetter just omitted it. The family knew he spelled it with a K. I caught that discrepancy by cross-referencing the 1930 census, where he clearly signed his name with the K. When you find the obituary, don't just copy the text. Map out every person mentioned. Spouse. Children. Siblings. Parents. In-laws. Neighbors who are listed as pallbearers often are close family friends who can point you to other records. I once traced an entire extended Bostick family in eastern Tennessee by following the names of men who carried the casket at a funeral in 1951. Four of those pallbearers turned out to be second cousins I hadn't connected yet. Here's something beginners miss: obituaries change over time. Before the 1970s, most papers printed obituaries that were basically boilerplate. They listed the basic facts and stopped. After that, they got longer, more personal, sometimes including hobbies or favorite passages from the Bible. If you're researching someone who died in 1968 and the obituary seems unusually detailed for that era, check whether the family paid extra for additional lines. Some papers charged by the inch. A short, sparse obituary might mean the family was poor or estranged from relatives, not that there were no relatives.
The big limitation with this whole process is that a lot of local newspapers from the early to mid-20th century simply don't exist in digitized form. I've hit dead ends where the county had one paper, it folded in 1941, and nobody scanned the issues from 1935 to 1940. In those cases, your only option is to visit the local library or historical society and request interlibrary loan of the microfilm. It takes about two weeks and costs you the price of a phone call and some patience. Worth it. If you want a starting point for finding digitized newspapers, the Library of Congress Chronicling America project is free and covers a lot of ground, especially for papers before 1963. Beyond that, Newspapers.com has the most comprehensive collection but it's subscription-based. Your local library might have free access to it with your card. Check first. One more thing. Obituaries are not primary sources in the genealogical sense. They're written by surviving family members who may not know all the facts correctly. I once found an obituary that said a man was born in 1890. His birth certificate, which I found three months later, said 1887. The son writing the obituary was off by three years. Always verify with another record when you can.
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The work of pulling these records together is tedious. You'll spend hours reading faded text and squinting at scan artifacts. But when you connect a name from a 1923 newspaper to a living relative who thought their family history started with their grandparents, it's worth the effort. That's the actual point of all of this. Not building a perfect tree. Making sure the people in it are remembered correctly.
