Getting Started With Obituary Research
Most people find obituaries by accident. They're looking up a great-aunt they barely remembered, and the search ends up taking three weekends. That's normal. The Greensburg area in western Pennsylvania has a dense obituary population because the Tribune-Review has been publishing them for decades, and before that, the Greensburg Daily Standard ran them going back much further. You can trace family lines through if you know where to look. The actual process isn't complicated, but it's easy to waste time on it. I spend maybe twenty minutes per person when I'm pulling obits from this archive. The Tribune-Review put their online archive behind a subscription wall a few years ago, so you'll need access through the website or through a library that carries the microfilm. Most people don't realize the library route is faster. The Westmoreland County Public Library system has microfilm readers that go back to the late 1800s, and you don't have to deal with any paywall or captcha. Walk in, find the microfilm cabinet for the date range you need, and you can pull a full issue in about forty-five seconds. Here's the thing beginners miss. Obituaries from this region tend to follow a very consistent format, which actually works against you if you're scanning too quickly. They'll list the deceased, the survivors, and the service details. But the useful genealogical information is usually buried in the second or third paragraph where they mention the parents' names or the military service. I've lost count of how many times someone finds an obituary, writes down the death date, and moves on without noticing the father's full name was right there. That single detail can connect you to the next generation backward.
I ran into a specific problem last year where I was researching a family that had moved through Greene County and ended up settling in Greensburg. The obituary for one patriarch listed a birthplace as "Westmoreland County" without a specific town. That's ambiguous. Westmoreland is huge. I cross-referenced the obituary with the 1900 and 1910 census records, and found that the same family appeared under a slightly different spelling in the census. The obituary had anglicized the surname, but the census had the original spelling. Once I caught that discrepancy, I could link the Greene County records to the Westmoreland records properly. The workaround was to search for variant spellings of the surname in Ancestry and FamilySearch, then filter by Westmoreland County birth. It took me about ten minutes once I knew what to look for. The Tribune-Review obituaries are particularly strong on military service notation. Going back to World War II, nearly every male obituary includes a line about their branch and rank. That's gold for connecting to military records and veteran files. For earlier generations, you'll sometimes find references to the Civil War, especially for men who lived long enough to be veterans of that conflict. Those mentions can point you toward pension records, which are held at the National Archives and sometimes include personal letters or affidavit documents that aren't available anywhere else. One counter-intuitive point: the date of death in an obituary is usually accurate, but the date of birth is not. Obituary writers often approximated ages, especially for people born before 1880 when vital records were inconsistent. I've seen at least half a dozen cases where the stated age in an obituary was off by four or five years. Always treat the birth year as an estimate unless you have a baptismal record or a Social Security application to confirm it. The death date is reliable though. Funeral homes verify that before submitting the copy to the paper.
If you're doing this seriously, set up a spreadsheet with columns for the person's full name, date of death, location of death, survivors listed, parents' names if mentioned, birthplace, military service, church affiliation, and the source citation. I write the source citation as "Greensburg Tribune-Review, [full date], [page number if available], [archive URL or microfilm roll number]." Having that citation from the start saves you from digging through back issues later when you've forgotten where you found it. There are real limitations to this approach. Not everyone gets an obituary. People who die alone, or whose families can't afford the word count, often get minimal notices or nothing at all. The Tribune-Review has run obituaries for non-residents who had family connections to the area, but the coverage is spotty before the 1960s. You'll also hit dead ends with common surnames. A search for "Robert Smith died Greensburg 1974" will return a dozen results and you'll need to weed through them manually. The microfilm at the library lets you flip through pages faster than the online search interface, which is why I prefer the physical route for busy periods. For people who want digital access without a subscription, the Internet Archive has some microfilm collections digitized. Search for "Greensburg Daily Standard" or "Greensburg Tribune-Review" on archive.org. The coverage is incomplete, but certain decades are fully available. I've pulled entire family clusters from there without spending a dime. Just be aware that the image quality varies and OCR text search is unreliable for older issues because the font styles confuse the recognition software. You'll need to browse page by page.
Get the Full Details
Another resource worth mentioning is the Westmoreland County Historical Society. They maintain a compiled index of obituaries that spans many decades and covers publications beyond just the Tribune-Review. It's not online, but the index cards are searchable in person. I've used it to fill gaps where the newspaper coverage was thin, particularly for the 1920s and earlier. The Historical Society is open to researchers during normal business hours, and the staff is willing to help you locate a specific name if you already know the general date range. When you're done pulling obituaries, cross-reference everything with the available census data, Pennsylvania vital records, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints records if your family was affiliated with a denomination that kept detailed membership books. The obituary gives you a starting point, but it won't replace primary documents. It's a signpost, not the destination.
