Finding Obituaries in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has published obituaries in Pennsylvania for over a century, and the archive is deeper than most people realize. If you are trying to track down a death notice from 1998 or a full obituary from 2003, the process is not as simple as running a search on their main site. The newspaper's digital archive has changed formats multiple times, and the transition between their print and online systems created a lot of gaps that researchers still run into. The most practical starting point is the Post-Gazette's own obituary section at post-gazette.com/obituaries. They maintain a searchable database going back to roughly 2000, though the quality of that data varies depending on whether the original submission was digitized or only stored as a scanned image. You can filter by last name, approximate date, and sometimes neighborhood or funeral home. The search function is adequate but not precise. You will get false positives and results that miss variants like "Margaret" versus "Maggie." For anything before 2000, you are dealing with scanned print pages. The newspaper microfilm collection at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Main Branch on Sixth Street is your best option. They have the complete run of the Post-Gazette going back to its founding, and they offer scanning services for individual pages. I spent an afternoon there looking for the obituary of a great-uncle who died in 1974, and the librarian actually pulled the microfilm reel herself. It took about twelve minutes to find the page and another ten to get a digital scan sent to my email. The fee was minimal, something like five dollars for the scan. If you go in person, bring cash for the copier in case they do not accept cards.
There is a specific problem that catches a lot of people off guard. The Post-Gazette published obituaries in a separate section called the "Life Celebrations" section, and the formatting of that section changed around 2005. Before that change, obituaries were listed alphabetically by last name on a single page with minimal text. After 2005, they switched to more full-length narratives. If you are searching under a specific date and not finding an obituary that you are sure ran, check if it was in the Life Celebrations pullout instead of the main news sections. I learned this the hard way trying to locate my grandmother's notice from 1999. I had been searching the main archive for weeks and kept coming up empty because the record was categorized under a different section entirely. The workaround was to pull the exact date and browse the scanned pages of that day's paper directly rather than relying on the search index. The GenealogyBank and Ancestry.com websites also carry Post-Gazette obituary archives, and some people prefer those platforms because the search interface is smoother. However, the coverage on those third-party sites is incomplete and you are paying for access. The Carnegie Library route is free if you have a library card, and even out-of-county cards from many Pennsylvania library systems work there. The Allegheny County Public Library system is particularly helpful if you live nearby. One counter-intuitive thing about these obituaries is that the death date and the publication date are often different. A person might have died on a Tuesday, but the obituary does not appear until Thursday or Friday because families need time to arrange details and submit the notice. The funeral home typically handles the submission, and delays happen frequently around holidays when staff is short. If you are searching by death date and the obituary does not show up, expand your search window by three to five days in both directions. This alone resolves a large number of otherwise frustrating dead ends.
Another detail beginners miss is that the Post-Gazette sometimes published obituaries under a "Pittsburgh" or "Pennsylvania" designation even for people who lived in surrounding suburbs. If you are researching someone from Wexford, Robinson Township, or Monroeville and cannot find the notice, try broadening your geographic filter or searching without any location constraint at all. The paper's circulation area covers a wide swath of southwestern Pennsylvania, and the indexing does not always capture the distinction between city and suburb properly. If you need documents for legal purposes, such as probate or inheritance claims, the Carnegie Library scans are generally accepted as preliminary evidence, but you may ultimately need a certified copy from the county Register of Wills office. The Allegheny County Register of Wills holds death records, and those are separate from the newspaper's publication. They keep records going back to 1877 for deaths that occurred in Allegheny County. The processing time for certified copies is usually about two weeks, and the current fee is around twelve dollars per copy. You can request them online through the county's registry portal, but you will need the deceased person's full legal name and date of death to initiate the request. The Post-Gazette also runs a paid memorial program where families can publish more elaborate notices with photographs and longer biographical details. These tend to be easier to find because they are held in the digitized portion of the archive with full metadata. If your search target falls into that category, the odds of locating it online are high. If the person had a modest notice or no notice at all, you may be dealing with a gap that requires the microfilm route or a visit to the relevant funeral home's records.
Get the Full Details
I have found that combining multiple sources gives you the best results. Run the search on the Post-Gazette site first. Then check the Carnegie Library microfilm for the same date range. Then look at the death certificate through the Register of Wills if you need official confirmation. Each source fills in gaps left by the others. The newspaper tells you what was published. The death certificate tells you the official record. The funeral home may have the original submission with details that never made it into the printed version, like the name of the pastor who officiated or the specific church where the service was held. The main bottleneck in this whole process is time. Scanning microfilm and waiting for certified copies can stretch a simple genealogy search into a project that takes weeks rather than hours. If you are doing research for a book or a family history project, plan accordingly. Start with the online archive, move to the library for older material, and request certified documents only for the people where you need legal-grade proof. Most family researchers do not actually need the certified copies, and spending money on them prematurely just adds cost without adding value.
