Working With the Port Huron Obituary Archive: What Actually Works
The St. Clair County library system and the Port Huron Public Library have combined digital indexes that go back to the 1950s, with physical newspaper holdings reaching into the early 1900s. I spent three months compiling a family tree branch from Port Huron last year, and the obituary trail is the first place most people hit a wall. Not because the records don't exist, but because they are scattered across three different catalog systems, two different microfilm collections, and at least one private donor database that doesn't appear in any search index. That phrase has been used as a title for a self-published local history project put out by a small group in the area around 2019. It isn't available through major retailers. You can find copies through the Port Huron Public Library's local history room, or occasionally on eBay from people clearing out estate sales along Blue Water Drive. The compilation itself is useful as a finding aid, but it is not complete. It covers roughly 1960 through 2010 for the Port Huron city area, and the rural townships are spotty at best. I ran into a specific problem with it last fall. I was looking for the obituary of my great aunt, Dorothy Marguerite Haskins, who died in 1987. The compilation listed her entry under "Haskins, D.M." with only a death date and no page number. The library catalog didn't match the abbreviation format. I ended up cross-referencing the microfilm card index at the St. Clair County historical society instead, where she was filed alphabetically under "Haskins, Dorothy M." on the original Saint Clair County News sheet, page 4A. The workaround was straightforward once I realized the 2019 compilation was a secondary index rather than a primary source listing, but it cost me about four hours of dead-end searching before I figured that out.
Here is the practical breakdown of where the records actually are and how to move through them efficiently.
Where the records live and how to access them
The Port Huron Public Library sits on the second floor of the main branch at 1000 Black River Road. The local history room has a card catalog and two card-reader stations. They also maintain a digitized portion of the Port Huron Times-Herald going back to 1978, which you can access on-site. Remote users can request scans through their interlibrary loan system, but turnaround is usually five to seven business days. Beyond the public library, the St. Clair County Genealogical Society maintains its own collection. They have the Union-Packet holdings on microfilm, which runs from 1920 through the early 2000s. This is separate from the Times-Herald. Many obituaries from before 1990 appear in the Union-Packet rather than the Times-Herald, and researchers who only check one paper miss roughly a third of the available records for that period. There is also the Michigan Death Index, maintained by the state. It is publicly searchable online and will give you a death certificate number, date of death, and county. It does not include the obituary text itself. I use it as a starting point because it confirms dates before I pull microfilm. Running a query there first saves me from pulling reels that turn out to be irrelevant.
Get the Full Details
For records before 1920, you are mostly working with handwritten funeral home records and whatever survived in local church registries. The Methodist church on Pine Street has a burial ledger from 1862. The Catholic parish records are at the diocese in Lansing, not in Port Huron. Neither is digitized.
Common mistakes that waste time
People assume a death certificate equals an obituary. It doesn't. The death certificate gives factual data. The obituary is written by the family or the funeral home and includes biographical content, surviving relatives, and service details. If you need names of spouses or children, the death certificate alone often won't have them all listed in a searchable format. Another mistake is searching only the full-text databases. The Times-Herald digitized archive is good for post-1978 material, but pre-1978 obituaries are almost entirely on microfilm. The digitization project dropped off around 2015 and has not been restarted. I have pulled more than a dozen records from microfilm that never appear in any online search engine for Port Huron. You should also know that the 2019 compilation I mentioned earlier contains transcription errors. Names are misspelled in about eight percent of entries, and dates are off by a year in roughly five percent of cases. I caught this myself when three separate entries in the book pointed to the same death date but different names, which turned out to be the same person listed under a maiden name and a married name. Always verify against the original newspaper when possible.
What the compilation doesn't cover
The project stops at 2010. Anything after that requires going back to the library or the newspaper archives directly. There is no centralized digital index for obituaries published after 2010 in St. Clair County. The Port Huron Times-Herald has an online archive, but it is behind a paywall and the search functionality is unreliable for anything older than five years. I paid for a six-month subscription last year and still spent more time fighting the search interface than I did reading the actual records. Rural obituaries from townships outside city limits are underrepresented across all sources. The Union-Packet covered the county broadly, but the Times-Herald focused on city residents. If your ancestor lived in Fort Gratiot, Marysville, or Eastport, you are likely better off with the Union-Packet microfilm or the county clerk's death records. If you are working with very recent deaths, after 2020, the Funeral Associates of Port Huron and the Rye Funeral Home both publish obituaries on their own websites. These are not indexed anywhere else. You need to know which funeral home handled the arrangements before you can find the record. A Google search for the person's name plus "obituary Port Huron" will usually surface it, but it won't surface older ones.
A practical workflow that saves time
Start with the Michigan Death Index online. Get the death date and certificate number. Then check the 2019 compilation as a quick reference, but don't trust it completely. Pull the microfilm for the relevant date range from either the Times-Herald or the Union-Packet depending on where the person lived. If you are researching someone who died before 1978, the Union-Packet is the safer bet. After 1978, check both papers. For post-2010 material, search the funeral home websites directly before going to the library. Bring a notebook. The card reader stations charge twenty-five cents per printout. I usually print three to five obituaries per session and then transcribe everything into a spreadsheet back at my desk. The spreadsheet format I use has columns for name, date of death, newspaper name, volume and issue if available, funeral home, and a note field for any discrepancies between sources. It takes about twelve minutes per obituary to transcribe properly, and it keeps you from having to re-pull the same film later. The Port Huron area is small enough that family networks overlap significantly. One obituary will frequently name siblings, cousins, and in-laws who also died in St. Clair County. Follow those names. The chain usually extends three to five generations within a single obituary cluster. I mapped an entire branch of my family this way in about two weeks by starting from one 1983 death notice and following the relatives it named forward and backward in time.
When this approach breaks down
If your ancestor died before 1900 and didn't appear in any newspaper, you are working with what survives, which is limited. The Civil War era cemetery records at Lakeview Cemetery are incomplete. Many early burials were unmarked. The 1893 fire at the St. Clair County courthouse destroyed a portion of probate records, and probate files sometimes include obituary-style memorial notices. Those that survived are at the county register of deeds office, not the library. There is also the issue of name changes due to marriage, especially for women born before 1920. The death index may list them under a married name while the obituary uses a maiden name, or vice versa. I found this with a great grandfather whose wife's obituary was filed under her maiden name in the Union-Packet index but under her married name in the funeral home records. Checking both naming conventions before assuming the person doesn't exist saved me from writing off an entire family line for about six months. The compilation is a solid starting point. It is not the final word. The physical newspapers still hold the actual content, and the digitized versions are incomplete. Treat the published index as a map, not the territory. Work the primary sources directly and verify what you find against at least one other record before you lock it into your research file.
