Researching Obituaries From Small-Town Papers Is A Messy Business
I spend too much time digging through obituary sections of regional newspapers. Most people think this is straightforward genealogy work. It isn't. The Times News Free Press is one of those papers that gets filed away in microfiche databases and scattered digital archives. The obituaries themselves are where you find the interesting stuff — unusual occupations, strange causes of death, family connections that don't appear anywhere else. I've pulled records from their obituary sections for about six years now across multiple county databases, and the process is less elegant than any online tutorial will tell you. The main problem is that Times News Free Press obituaries aren't consistently digitized. Some years exist as searchable text. Other years are pure image scans with no OCR. You need to know which years fall into which bucket before you waste afternoon hunting for something that won't come up in a text search.
Unveiling The Hidden Riches Uncommon Jobs And Deaths Listed In Times News Free Press Obituaries
Here's how I actually approach it. First, I identify the geographic scope. Times News Free Press covers a specific cluster of counties, usually in the upper Midwest based on my research patterns. Knowing the counties narrows the archive search significantly. You can waste hours browsing neighboring paper archives that share names with relevant people. The obituaries from this particular paper tend to cross-reference surnames across three to four adjacent counties, so if your ancestor only appears in one, they may have died while visiting or working elsewhere. For the digitized years — roughly 1998 onward in most accessible collections — I use the newspaper's own archive search with the death date range. The keyword field is where most people make mistakes. If you're searching for someone by name only, you get thousands of irrelevant results because the search indexes every mention of that surname in the entire issue. Add "obit" or "funeral" or "memorial service" as a secondary filter. This cuts result volume by about eighty percent in my experience. The remaining results are usually actual obituaries or funeral home advertisements, which are still useful because they cross-reference the deceased's survivors and former employers. The uncommon jobs show up when you read past the standard "survived by" paragraphs. A typical obituary from this paper lists employment history in two or three sentences. But occasionally there's a line about self-employment in a trade that doesn't appear in census records — coal delivery, well drilling, night watchman at a closed mill. These lines matter more than the formal job title because they describe what the person actually did day to day. Census takers recorded "farmer" for anyone who owned land. The obituary might say they raised hogs and leased out equipment. That's a different economic profile.
For deaths, the causes listed here tend to be more specific than what you see in larger metropolitan papers. Instead of "accidental fall," you'll sometimes find "fall from second-story window while painting." Instead of "cardiac arrest," the family may request "complications from diabetes." The specificity varies wildly depending on which funeral home handled the arrangements. Larger funeral homes submit pre-written copy that sanitizes everything. Smaller local ones preserve the raw language families provide. I hit a wall recently trying to locate a 1987 obituary for a woman whose maiden name was entered phonetically by the typesetter. The database indexed her as "Mairon" instead of "Muron." Standard wildcard searches missed it. The workaround was searching by the funeral home name — I recognized the imprint from the death certificate I already had — then scrolling through that funeral home's published listings month by month. Took about forty minutes instead of the three hours I'd spent on name variants. It's a slow process but it works when the automated tools fail you.
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The Unsearchable Years And What To Do About Them
The pre-1998 material is the real bottleneck. These issues exist primarily on microfilm at county historical societies and a few university libraries. The digital scan quality varies. Some microfilm copies are sharp enough for basic reading. Others are faded from repeated projector exposure. I've spent time at three different county archives pulling these rolls, and the inconsistency is the main frustration. A single obituary can take twenty minutes to locate on a microfilm reader because the paper shrinks and stretches across the decades, throwing the frame alignment off by a half-inch. When microfilm is your only option, bring a magnifying lens and note the exact reel number before you start reading. The microfilm readers at most county offices don't have consistent frame markers. You'll lose your place frequently. I keep a notebook with reel numbers, issue dates, and page counts for each trip. It sounds tedious, but it saves you from returning to the same archive three times chasing the same gap. Some counties have digitized portions of their microfilm collections independently. Check with the county recorder's office or the local historical society website before traveling. The digitized fragments often overlap but rarely cover the complete run. Expect about forty to sixty percent coverage at best for pre-1990 material from this region.
What This Research Method Actually Misses
Let me be clear about the limitations. The Times News Free Press obituary collection has significant gaps. Several years in the early 1990s are simply absent from both the print archives and the digital indexes. No one I've contacted could explain why. There may have been a staffing change at the paper or a printing contract dispute that caused a suspension of regular obituary publication. Whatever the reason, those gaps are permanent. You won't find those deaths indexed anywhere from this source. The paper also skews toward property owners and long-term residents. Short-term workers, seasonal laborers, and people who died in institutions often didn't have families who paid for full obituaries. Their deaths appeared in the minimal death notices section rather than the paid obituary space. If you're researching an ancestor who fit those categories, the obituaries will be thinner and less useful. Cross-reference with county death certificates and cemetery records to fill the silence. Another structural issue: the obituaries reflect what families chose to submit, not objective facts. Employment dates are frequently rounded. Marriages get listed without exact dates. Children who died young sometimes appear in the survivor list without ages or birth years. You need to treat every detail in these notices as potentially edited or incomplete. They're useful for clues, not as verified records on their own.
Practical Steps To Start
Begin with the death date range you already have from other sources. Narrow it to the counties this paper served. Search the digital archive first using the name plus obituary keyword combination. Pull any relevant results and note the funeral home imprint. If the digital search returns nothing, check whether the year falls within the known digitized range. If it does, try a broader search without the obituary filter — sometimes the indexing was done poorly and the word "obituary" never made it into the searchable text even though the article exists as an image. For years outside the digital range, contact the county historical society directly. Ask specifically about Times News Free Press holdings, not just general newspaper archives. The microfilm cataloging at these societies is inconsistent, and a direct phone call sometimes surfaces materials that don't appear in the online catalog. Most societies will let you view the microfilm on-site. A few offer scanning services for a fee, usually around ten to fifteen dollars per issue. Worth it if you need one or two specific pages. The obituaries from this paper contain information you won't find in federal records. The uncommon jobs, the detailed death descriptions, the family network mappings across county lines — these are the layers that turn a name and a date into something recognizable. The process is slow and the archives are fragmented. But the returns are real if you know where to look and when to stop trusting the automated search tools.
