Working With The Sharon Herald Obituary Archive
The Sharon Herald has been publishing local news in Sharon, Massachusetts since 1887. Their obituary section runs consistently, and the paper went digital around 2010, but getting at the full records takes some effort. Most people hit a wall quickly because the online archive is incomplete and the older physical copies are scattered across multiple repositories. Start with the library. The Sharon Public Library on Main Street keeps microfilm for the Herald going back to the late 1800s. They also have bound volumes of the paper that haven't been microfilmed, which matters because some early 20th century issues didn't make it to film. The library's reference desk will let you pull the physical volumes if the microfilm reader is broken, which it often is on weekday mornings. Go in the afternoon if you can. For the digital side, the Boston Public Library has a subscription to Newspapers.com that includes the Herald. You can access it from any BPL branch with a library card, and their terminals are set up for longer sessions than the ones at the Sharon location. This is useful when you're trying to piece together a family across multiple decades, because you can pull obituaries for five or six generations without getting booted off the system every twenty minutes.
Here is where it gets tricky. The Herald didn't standardize obituary formats until the 1970s. Before that, you will find notices that are three lines long, announcements that are full columns, and everything in between. Some include birth dates. Most don't. A good number list only the surviving family members and a funeral home, which is actually helpful for cross-referencing but useless for pinpointing when someone was born. I spent about six weeks tracking down a great-grandmother's death date in 1923 because the obituary just said she died "recently" and mentioned her husband John by first name only. The workaround was finding her in the 1920 census on a different page of the same paper, then confirming through the town clerk's death records at the Sharon Town Hall. The death certificate had the exact date and listed her maiden name, which the obituary never did. The town clerk's office maintains death records from 1902 onward. You can request copies by mail with a notarized form, or go in person. There is a ten-dollar fee per record. They also keep marriage records that sometimes mention obituary details indirectly, like when a spouse's name appears in a marriage announcement decades earlier. This is worth pulling even if you already have the death record, because names change through remarriage and the obituary might only reference the most recent husband. For the older material before 1902, you are looking at the Upper Chester County Historical Society or the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. The Herald existed before then, but the paper was smaller and less consistent with death notices. Some families published memorial cards separately that got clipped and filed manually, and those collections are held by local historical societies rather than the newspaper itself.
Another thing nobody tells you: the OCR on digitized versions of the Herald is unreliable for anything before 1950. If you search Newspapers.com for a name and get zero results, try browsing the actual pages. The text recognition misses a lot of typesetter errors, weird fonts, and columns that ran sideways due to layout problems. I found an entire family cluster by flipping through November 1934 issue pages manually. The search function returned nothing for any of those names, but the obituaries were there on page four. The biggest bottleneck is that the Herald stopped publishing full obituaries for non-residents in the 1990s. If your ancestor moved away before dying, they likely won't appear in the Sharon Herald even if they lived there for forty years. You have to track down the paper in the town where the death actually occurred. This catches people off guard because they assume local birth or long-term residency is enough. It isn't. If you are doing serious research, set up a spreadsheet with columns for date, full name as printed, apparent age, surviving family members, funeral home, and source type. The variations in how names are recorded across different decades will drive you crazy if you don't catch them early. "Mary E. Sullivan" becomes "Mary Ellen Sullivan O'Brien" becomes just "Mrs. Patrick O'Brien" depending on the era and the writer's habits.
Get the Full Details
The Massachusetts Genealogical Society has some transcription projects for local papers, but they haven't touched the Herald systematically. Don't waste time waiting for that to happen. It isn't coming. The most efficient path is still the microfilm at the library, supplemented by the death certificates from town hall and manual page browsing for anything before 1950.
