Obituaries are the first place people think to look when they hit a brick wall in family research. I spent about three years pulling together a complete branch of my mother's side of the family, and honestly, the obits did more heavy lifting than census records ever did.
The Courier Post, or any decent local paper, runs obituaries that are quietly one of the best genealogy resources available and most researchers underutilize them. You get names, dates, surviving relatives, military service, church affiliations, sometimes even a list of schools attended or employers. That single paragraph can close a gap that would otherwise take weeks of archive diving. Here is how I actually use them in practice. First, get the date range right. If someone died in 1974, the obit likely ran between March 12 and March 15. Search a little wider than the death date because sometimes papers run them on weekends or early Monday morning. I once spent forty-five minutes looking for an obit that had actually been published on a Friday because the editor had moved the funeral service from Saturday to Friday and nobody told the typesetter. The physical archives at the local library are still useful for anything before digitization hit. The Courier Post went fully digital around 2006 or so, and before that you need to go to the microfilm room. Bring a camera or your phone with decent resolution. The microfilm printers are awful at preserving detail, and squinting at faded type through a reader lens will ruin your back without giving you anything worth the effort.
What most people miss is that the obit itself is only half the document. Look at who survived them. The surviving children section usually lists married daughters with their current street addresses, which means you can verify a marriage date or find a sibling who moved away and disappeared from local records. I found an entire line of cousins just by reading through a grandmother's obit and noticing three grandchildren born in Ohio when the rest of the family was in Pennsylvania. That clue sent me to the right county clerk's office instead of wasting another month searching the wrong state. Military service notation matters more than you would think. If an obit mentions "Korean War veteran" or "served in the Navy aboard the USS Tolland," that is a direct path to service records at the National Archives. Those files often contain enlistment addresses, next of kin at the time of induction, and sometimes medical discharge papers that reveal health issues the family never discussed. I pulled a discharge record that listed an address in Camden that no census or directory had captured, and it turned out the person had lived there briefly before moving to the neighborhood where I found them documented. The real problem with obituary research is inconsistency. Some families write detailed sketches. Others send a single sentence set by someone who barely knew the deceased and got the dates wrong. I once found an obit that listed a birth year off by four years because the funeral home clerk had misread the family bible entry. Cross-reference everything. A census record from 1940 or a draft card from 1917 will usually correct the error if you know where to look.
Another issue is the death notice versus the obituary distinction. Death notices are paid advertisements, usually shorter and factual. Obituaries are often written by family members and contain more biographical detail. The Courier Post carries both, and they sometimes appear on different pages or even different days. If you only search one section, you miss half the available information. I stopped treating them as separate documents and started pulling both every single time, regardless of what the header says. For older material before digitization, contact the local historical society. The Courier Post does not retain its complete archive in-house past about twenty years. Older issues end up at the county historical society or the state library. I spent an afternoon at the New Jersey State Library in Trenton pulling microfilm that had not been digitized because the Courier Post had not partnered with any of the major genealogy databases for pre-1990 content. Those records were there, properly filed, and completely free to access. The database sites charge subscription fees for material that exists in public archives if you are willing to make the trip. Clipping indexes are another resource most people overlook. The Courier Post maintained a clipping file in the reference room for decades. These are hand-indexed by subject and include not just obituaries but social pages, business openings, weddings, and local event notices. A single index card might point you to three different articles about one family over a ten-year span. I found a wedding announcement for a great-uncle through the clipping index that confirmed a marriage date the obit had never mentioned and that no online database had indexed.
Get the Full Details
The digitized versions on newspapers.com and ancestry.com are convenient but imperfect. OCR errors are rampant, especially with older typefaces. A "B" becomes an "8." A "1912" becomes "19T2." Search with wildcards and broad terms. If you type the exact name into the search box and get nothing, try just the surname and a date range. Sometimes the full-text search misses the name because the OCR mangled it, but the image viewer shows the obit clearly enough to read. One practical limitation I want to mention upfront: obituaries only exist for people whose families could afford to place them or had connections with the paper. This creates a skewed sample. Poor families, rural residents without local ties, and people who died unexpectedly without advance notice often did not get published coverage. If your ancestor falls into one of these categories, the absence of an obit is itself data. It might mean the family had limited means, or the death occurred during a period when the paper had reduced staffing, or the person lived in an area the paper did not cover well. For working through gaps, check the funeral home records. Most obituaries are filed through funeral homes, and those businesses keep copies. I tracked down an obit that the paper had printed but which later got removed from the digital archive due to a formatting migration error. The funeral home still had the original layout on file and was happy to send a scan. This happened with maybe three or four families across my entire research project, but those four cases saved me from dead ends that would have taken months to resolve otherwise.
If you are starting this work now, here is a practical sequence I follow. Pull the death certificate first. Get the exact date and place of death. Then search the obituary using that date plus a two-day window on either side. Read the full text carefully, noting every name mentioned. Search census records for those names. Then move backward through the family using sibling and cousin obituaries, which often list the same survivors and create a network of connected records. This method typically lets me reconstruct a generation in about a week of focused work if the local paper has adequate coverage. Download links for the actual archives are straightforward. The Courier Post's own website has an archive search, but it is limited to about twenty years of content. For older material, the local library's digital collection or the state historical society's online portal is the way to go. Neither requires a subscription, though some libraries do require an in-state resident card for remote access to their digitized local papers.
