Working With Star Gazette Obituaries Actually Isn't As Clean As You'd Hope
I've spent more hours than I care to admit scrolling through microfilm and digitized archives trying to piece together family histories from the Star Gazette, and honestly the process is a lot less glamorous than it sounds on paper. The paper has been around since 1884, published out of Morristown, New York, and it covers Greene County and parts of the surrounding Hudson Valley region. If your ancestors lived in that area, their obituaries ended up here whether you wanted them to or not. The main issue people run into right away is that the Star Gazette wasn't consistently digitized until relatively recently. Before 2010 or so, you're mostly looking at microfilm or physical copies, and even the digital versions have gaps. I spent an entire afternoon tracking down a single obituary for my great-great grandmother in 2019 because the digitization project missed roughly three months in 1972. There was no record of those issues online, no index, nothing. I had to contact the paper's office directly and they mailed me photocopies of the relevant pages. Took two weeks and cost me eight dollars.
Unveiling The Past A Deep Dive Into Star Gazette Obits Today
If you want to actually do this research without losing your mind, here is the workflow I use. Start with the current digitized archive. The Star Gazette has a subscription-based digital platform through NewspaperARCHIVE and also appears on the GenealogyBank paid service. Neither is free. They cover roughly 2010 to the present pretty reliably, though I've noticed some issues with images where the scanner completely missed a column and you get blank pages instead of the obituary layout. For the older stuff, you have a few options. The Greene County Historical Society holds microfilm collections. They're not exactly research-friendly in terms of hours, but they do have the complete run going back to the late 1800s. Your local library might have interlibrary loan access to the microfilm through the state archives in Albany. The New York State Library in Albany has a genealogy division that holds newspaper microfilm for upstate papers including the Star Gazette. I've used their reading room twice and each visit takes about four hours round trip from where I live, so plan accordingly. The obituary format in this paper changed significantly over the decades. In the 1920s and 1930s, obituaries were short notices, sometimes just two or three lines naming the deceased and the service details. By the 1950s they grew into one or two columns with biographical detail. The 1970s brought the modern format with family listings, church information, and donor acknowledgments. Knowing what you're looking for changes your search strategy. Searching for full text in the newer format is straightforward. The short notices from the early decades often get missed by keyword searches because they don't contain the expected phrases like "died" or "funeral."
One thing that trips people up repeatedly is the naming conventions. Women are listed under their husband's name in older issues. If you're searching for a woman who died before 1940, searching her maiden name will return nothing half the time. She'll be listed as Mrs. John Smith even if nobody in the family ever called her that. I discovered this the hard way when I was looking for my grandmother's mother who died in 1938. Her maiden name was Margaret Chenoweth and I found zero results. Once I switched to searching for her husband Edward's surname, I found her obituary on the first try. It read essentially that she was survived by her husband and five children and that the service would be at the Baptist church. That was it. No birth date, no parents listed, no hometown before marriage. Useful for confirming she died in Greene County in March 1938, useless for anything else. Another pitfall is that the Star Gazette sometimes published obituaries that were actually written by the family and submitted as advertising. These are marked as "in memoriam" or "tribute" sections but function as de facto obituaries. The content can be more detailed than the standard notices because families had more space to work with. I've found some genuinely good information in these paid submissions that didn't appear anywhere else, including a full list of grandchildren and their locations that I never would have found otherwise. If you're doing this research systematically, keep a spreadsheet. I track the date, page number, headline, names mentioned, and any cross references to other records. This matters because the same person might appear in multiple issues. A death notice runs the day of or right after death, then the funeral notice a few days later, and sometimes a thank you note from the family weeks after that. Each piece contains different information and without tracking them all you'll miss connections.
Get the Full Details
The limitations are real. The Star Gazette's coverage area has shifted over time. Towns that are now in Sullivan or Ulster counties might have appeared in their pages regularly in the early 1900s and then disappeared from coverage as distribution patterns changed. If your ancestor lived in what is now a neighboring county but your family maintained ties to the Greene County area, they might still show up in the Star Gazette for decades after moving away. Or they might not. There is no consistent rule. For people who want a easier entry point, the FamilySearch catalog has some digitized issues available for free search. Search "Star Gazette" in their catalog and you'll find specific date ranges that have been scanned. It's hit or miss but it covers some periods that aren't available elsewhere. The Internet Archive also has some microfilm scans uploaded by libraries, though the quality varies enormously. Some are readable. Many are not. The bottom line is that this is tedious work with inconsistent results. The records exist but accessing them requires patience and a willingness to deal with poor image quality, incomplete indexing, and occasional gaps that no amount of searching will fill. I've found enough to make it worthwhile for my own research, but I wouldn't recommend it as a primary source unless you're already familiar with the area and have other records to cross-reference against.
