Looking Through Battle Creek's Obituary Archive
Battle Creek has been around long enough that if you dig into the old Enquirer records, you will find something useful. The paper started publishing in the 1800s and ran daily until it folded decades ago, and now its obituary section is mostly scattered across microfilm, digitized PDFs, and a few database indexes that are incomplete. I spent about three weekends last year tracking down a great-uncle who died in 1962. The digitized version of the paper had a gap from November 1961 through March 1962, which meant the obituary was hiding somewhere nobody expected. The biggest mistake people make is assuming the online indexes are complete. Ancestry.com and FamilySearch have the Enquirer obits, but they missed roughly 18 percent of what I checked during my own research. The index entries sometimes list only the first name or give a death date that is off by a week or two. You have to go back to the actual page image every time, and then cross-reference with cemetery records if you need anything beyond a name and a date. Here is the workflow I use when searching for a specific person in these records. First, I pull the death certificate from the Michigan Department of Community Health. It gives me the exact date of death, the attending physician, and the funeral home that handled arrangements. Then I check the funeral home's records. Some of them, like the older ones still operating in Calhoun County, keep their own ledgers that predate the newspaper coverage. I found a set of obituaries from 1898 that never made it into the digital scan because the original microfilm was damaged and the library's replacement copy skipped those months.
The Battle Creek Public Library sits on West Michigan Avenue and they have the full microfilm run of the Enquirer going back to 1853. The equipment is old. The machine jams if you try to fast-forward more than ten frames at a time, and the light bulb blows out every couple of years. I brought my own portable scanner and photographed the pages directly instead of using the built-in scanner, which saved me about twenty minutes per session and got much clearer images than the library's outdated copying machine. Another detail that trips people up is that the Enquirer didn't publish every obituary. If a family used a smaller funeral home outside the main advertising circuit, or if they requested no public notice, the paper simply didn't carry it. The Calhoun County coroner's files from the 1930s through the 1950s sometimes contain obituary-style notices that never appeared in any newspaper. Those are tucked away in the county clerk's office on South West Street, and they don't have a public searchable index. You show up, fill out a request form, and wait about two weeks for the archives staff to pull the boxes. I also learned the hard way that the Enquirer merged its printing operations at different points in history. Between 1982 and 1991, the paper's layout was handled by a Detroit-based syndicate that occasionally republished obituaries from other Midwestern papers without attribution. If you see a Battle Creek obituary that lists a death date in Illinois or Indiana, it might actually belong to a different paper's reader who happened to have family in the area. It sounds unlikely, but I caught three of these in a single afternoon by checking the funeral home address against the cemetery plot records at Resurrection Cemetery on the east side.
The digitized versions from newspapers.com have some real gaps too. The years 1974 through 1978 are missing large chunks, and the 1941 to 1944 period has a lot of faded text where the original newsprint was cheap wartime stock. You are better off going to the library or the historical society for those stretches. The Calhoun County Historical Society has a separate collection of church burial records that overlaps with the newspaper run and fills some of those holes, though their catalog system is not great and you have to ask a volunteer to look things up by hand. If you are doing genealogy work on anyone who lived in the Battle Creek area before 1970, plan on spending a day at the library and another day at the historical society. The online databases will get you partway there, but they will leave gaps that only show up once you have the physical paper in front of you. The process is slower than scanning a PDF, but the accuracy difference is significant enough that you will catch errors you would have otherwise carried forward into your family tree.
Get the Full Details
