Reading Local Obituaries Is Different From What You Might Expect
The Green Bay Press Gazette runs one of the more substantial obituary sections in northeastern Wisconsin, and if you are looking into it for genealogy, local history, or just trying to understand family connections, there is a method to doing it that most people miss. The obvious path is to visit the website and search, but that approach leaves a lot on the table. I spent considerable time going through their archive a few years ago while tracking down my grandmother's side of the family, and what I found shaped how I approach these records now. The first thing you need to understand is that the Press Gazette obituary database is not a clean, well-organized index. It is a running archive of notices that have been published since the paper went digital, and the quality varies dramatically depending on the year and the family's involvement. Notices from the late 2010s onward tend to be fuller, often including bullet points about survivors, service details, and sometimes links to funeral home pages. Older entries, especially those pulled from the pre-digital print run, are usually sparse. A name, a date, maybe a sentence or two. That is just how it works. I ran into a specific problem that took me weeks to solve. I was looking for an obituary for a woman who died in 2003, and the digital archive had no entry under her married name. The search engine simply returned nothing. What I eventually figured out was that the newspaper sometimes published obituaries under the maiden name if that is how the family filed them, and other times under a name she went by socially that was different from both. I ended up contacting the Press Gazette's archive department directly, provided the funeral home name and the approximate date, and they pulled the print clipping and scanned it for me. That process took about five business days. Going forward, I always start with the funeral home rather than the paper's search tool. Most obituaries in the Green Bay area flow through a small number of establishments, and those places keep better records than any newspaper archive does.
Another counter-intuitive detail that most people overlook is the relationship between the obituary and the death index. The Press Gazette does not publish death dates for every person who dies in Brown County or the surrounding area. They publish what families submit or what their staff writes. Empty nesters, people with no close family, and those whose estates were unsettled often do not get an obituary at all. If you are hitting dead ends in the paper, the Wisconsin Death Index through the State Records Center is a parallel resource, but even that has gaps, particularly for deaths before 1907 when reporting was not standardized. The website search function itself has limitations that are not obvious at first glance. The default search is case-sensitive in ways that are not stated anywhere on the page, and it does not handle common abbreviations well. "Jr." and "Junior" are treated as different strings. Middle initials can cause mismatches if the obituary used the full name and your search used the initial. I developed a habit of searching by last name only plus the approximate year, then scrolling through the results rather than relying on the autocomplete or suggested names. It is slower, but it catches things the algorithm misses. The pagination on the results page is also inconsistent, which means you can easily skip over an entry if you are not watching the page numbers carefully. For deeper research, the physical microfilm at the Brown County Historical Society is still the most complete record. The Press Gazette has been publishing since 1851, and the microfilm covers the entire run, including inserts and supplements that never made it into the digital archive. I spent a day there cataloging obituaries from the 1940s that were completely absent from the online version. The staff is helpful but not enthusiastic about it, so come prepared with specific date ranges and names. Browsing without a plan wastes time because the microfilm reader does not have a keyword search, only a date dial.
There is a practical workaround for people who need this information but cannot visit in person. The Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison holds digitized portions of Wisconsin newspapers through their database, and some Press Gazette content from the early twentieth century appears there. It is not the full run, but it covers certain years more completely than the paper's own archive does. You will need a free account to access it, and the image quality is lower than microfilm, but it is useful for filling gaps. If you are doing this for genealogical purposes, I would recommend keeping a spreadsheet with the following columns: full name as printed, date of death, date of obituary publication, funeral home, names of survivors listed, and a note about whether the online entry matches the microfilm version. The discrepancies matter more than you might think. I found three cases where the online obituary had an incorrect spouse name, likely due to a transcription error when the paper moved from print to digital. Cross-referencing with the funeral home record corrected it in every case. The main bottleneck in this whole process is that there is no central, searchable index of all Wisconsin obituaries. Each paper runs its own system, and the Press Gazette is no different. You can subscribe to email alerts for new obituaries in the Green Bay area through their website, which is useful if you are tracking living relatives, but it does not help with historical research. For that, you are mostly on your own, piecing together what is available across the digital archive, microfilm, funeral home records, and state death indexes. It is tedious, but the records are there if you know where to look and how to handle the gaps.
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