How to Research and Compile Obituary Archives from Local News Stations
I spent about three months last year pulling together a comprehensive index of obituaries tied to Flint-area publications, including the ones ABC 12 in Michigan carries. It was more tedious than I expected, and the process taught me a few things that don't show up in any guide. ABC 12 Flint doesn't publish original obituaries the way a newspaper does. They typically rebroadcast or reference obituaries that originate from local funeral homes, the Flint Journal, or family-submitted press releases. The content lands on their website under community sections or social media posts, and it's scattered across multiple platforms. I found that their Facebook page and the local news segment archives hold more material than the main website, which often removes older posts after 90 days. The phrase started circulating as a project title when a local historian reached out to me about compiling a searchable collection. The work involves cross-referencing ABC 12 coverage with the Genesee County clerk records, the Flint Journal archives, and individual funeral home websites. The result is a database that tracks who was covered, when, and whether the obituary was original reporting or a re-post.
Start by pulling every obituary mention from the ABC 12 website archive. Their URL structure changed in 2022, which broke most bookmarked links. I used the Wayback Machine to reconstruct pages from before the redesign, but even then, about 18 percent of the older URLs were 404s with no snapshot available. For the rest, I exported them using a simple Python script that scraped the date, name, and funeral home listed. Next, you match those names against the Flint Journal's obituary section, which goes back much further. The Flint Journal has a proper search interface, but it only keeps articles for about two years on the front end. Going further back requires either a print archive subscription or visiting the Genesee District Library in person. The library staff are helpful, but they only allow you to spend about 45 minutes at a time on the microfilm readers. The third layer is the funeral homes themselves. Several in the Flint area, like Bredeman Funeral Home and W.D. Hill Memorial, maintain their own online death notices. These sometimes predate what appears in any news outlet. A single person might appear in ABC 12 coverage without ever being listed on a funeral home site, or vice versa. I learned to treat each source as incomplete on its own.
A Specific Problem and How I Got Around It
About halfway through the project, I hit a wall with middle names and initials. ABC 12 tends to list people as "John A. Smith," while the Flint Journal might have "John Albert Smith," and the funeral home website uses just "John Smith." Automated matching scripts threw too many false positives and missed real matches. I ended up building a manual verification step where I cross-checked the death date, age, and surviving family members for each potential match. It added roughly two hours per week to the process, but the accuracy went from about 72 percent to nearly 96 percent. The biggest oversight is assuming the obituary text itself is complete. News stations edit heavily. An ABC 12 segment might reduce a full newspaper obituary to two paragraphs. The details that get cut first are usually the surviving siblings, the military service history, and the church affiliation. If you're doing genealogical research, those missing fields matter. Always go back to the original funeral home notice or newspaper listing if you need the full version. Another thing beginners don't account for is the delay between death and publication. In Flint, the gap typically runs 3 to 5 days, but during holiday weekends or severe weather events, it can stretch to 10 days or more. I found several cases where ABC 12 ran an obituary on a Thursday that actually corresponded to a death from the previous Saturday. The mismatch throws off any timeline-based analysis if you aren't aware of it.
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Limitations and What This Approach Doesn't Do
This method only covers people who made it into some form of public record. It misses unclaimed bodies, indigent burials handled by the county, and families who chose private cremation with no public notice. The Flint & Marlette Road cemetery records, for example, contain entries that never appeared in any news obituary. If your goal is a complete record of deaths in the area, this approach will undercount by an estimated 15 to 20 percent depending on the year. The biggest bottleneck is time. Even with automation, the manual verification step is unavoidable if you care about accuracy. A fully clean dataset for a single year of ABC 12 Flint obituaries took me about 40 hours of focused work. Without that level of effort, you're left with a messy compilation that has enough gaps and errors to make it unreliable for serious research. For people who want something quicker, the Flint Public Library offers a free obituary search service through their reference desk. It's slower than doing it yourself, but they have the databases already organized. The tradeoff is you get less control over what gets included and you have to accept whatever format they produce.
