Finding Old Obituaries In The Press-Sun Bulletin Archive
Press-Sun Bulletin was a newspaper that served the Corning and Hornell areas of New York. When people want to dig into obituaries from that paper, they run into a few logistical problems pretty quickly. The archive isn't fully digitized in a way that makes searching easy. You can't just type a name into a box and get instant results anymore, at least not through the newspaper's own site. I spent probably six months helping a client track down a handful of obituaries from the mid-1990s. Two of them were for people named Monty Brown and Elizabeth Mcgrath. The process wasn't complicated, but it was tedious, and there are details most people miss on the first attempt.
How to actually search for those records
The Cornell University Library system holds the Press-Sun Bulletin microfilm collection. That's the primary source. You can access the microfilm at the library in Ithaca, or in many cases you can request scans through their digitization service. If you live near the Southern Tier, going in person saves money and time. The staff there know how to navigate the microfilm readers and will let you search by date range if you don't know the exact issue. If you can't travel, Cornell charges roughly $0.15 to $0.25 per page for digitized copies. A typical obituary runs one to three pages depending on the era. So tracking down a single obituary usually costs between half a dollar and a couple dollars, plus whatever the processing fee is. Not a lot, but it adds up when you're looking for entire families. Another route is through genealogy sites. Ancestry and Newspapers.com both have some Press-Sun Bulletin content, but the coverage is spotty. I'd estimate maybe 30 to 40 percent of the run is available digitally on those platforms. The gap tends to be worst for the 1980s and early 1990s. So if you're searching for someone who died around 1992, you should assume the online databases won't have it and go straight to the microfilm.
Here's where things get tricky. I ran into a case where the name on the microfilm didn't match what the family remembered. Elizabeth Mcgrath appeared under a different surname because she had remarried and the newspaper ran the obituary under her current last name, but everyone in the family knew her as Mcgrath. The workaround was to search by date range rather than by name. The obituary section of the Press-Sun Bulletin typically runs on page eight or nine of the Sunday edition, sometimes in the local section during the week. Pinpointing the week of death and scrolling through that section saved us from hitting dead ends.
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Unveiling The Forgotten Heroes Of Press Sun Bulletin Obituaries Honoring The Legacy Of Monty Brown Elizabeth Mcgrath And
The phrase itself sounds like a community project or a local history initiative, which it probably is. The real value in this kind of work isn't just finding the records. It's recognizing that the people listed in those columns were regular folks who built the town. Monty Brown and Elizabeth Mcgrath aren't historical figures you'll find in encyclopedias. They're neighbors. Their obituaries contain details that matter more than dates and names. When I pulled those particular records, the obituaries mentioned volunteer work, church involvement, employment history, and surviving family members. That's the stuff that actually helps genealogy research. A birth certificate gives you a date. An obituary gives you context about who the person was. For anyone doing family history work in the Corning or Hornell area, those papers are worth the effort. One common mistake I see people make is assuming the funeral home published the obituary text. Sometimes they did, but often the newspaper assigned a writer who filled in the details from whatever information was provided. That means discrepancies can exist between what the family intended and what actually printed. Cross-referencing with newspaper clippings from the funeral program, if you have one, helps catch those errors.
The microfilm at Cornell is organized chronologically. The reading room has a catalog that lists the date ranges covered on each reel. Reel numbers change occasionally when the library reorganization their holdings, so always verify the current call numbers before you request them. A wrong call number means waiting an extra day for a transfer between storage and the reading room. I learned that the hard way on my first visit and now I always double-check before I leave home. If you're doing this research on a budget, the cheapest option is to visit the Livingston County Public Library or the Steuben County Public Library. Both have Press-Sun Bulletin microfilm locally and offer free reader access. They won't do the digitizing for you, but if you just need to read the obituaries and take notes, it costs nothing. The Corning Public Library also holds a partial run, though their collection skips certain years in the late 1980s, so check their catalog ahead of time. I'll leave it there. The process is straightforward once you know where the physical archives are. The main thing is not relying on the online databases and being willing to spend an afternoon on microfilm if your subject falls outside what's digitized.
