Reading Lake County Obituaries From The NWI Times Archives
I've spent more time than I care to admit digging through old NWI Times obituary records for family history research. The Indiana Northwest region has a specific archival quirk that catches most people off guard the first time they try to use it. Let me walk you through what actually works and where the dead ends are. The NWI Times (Northwest Indiana Times) is a daily newspaper that covered Lake, Porter, LaPorte, and Newton counties. Its obituary section ran from roughly the 1990s through the early 2010s before the paper folded and its assets were absorbed by other Tribune Media properties. For anyone researching relatives who died between 1995 and 2012 in those four counties, the obituaries are the single most useful primary source you'll find — but only if you know which archive layer to access. Here's the problem nobody tells you upfront. The current Indiana Digital Newspaper Project mirrors the NWI Times content, but the digitization is patchy. You might search for someone who died in October 2003 in Merrillville and find nothing, then realize the OCR pipeline skipped roughly six months of that year because of a scanner recalibration issue at the microfilm stage. I hit this exact gap when looking up my great-uncle's obituary. The workaround was going straight to the Lake County Public Library's local history room and pulling the original microfilm on their Rosenwald Library reader. It took me twenty minutes. The online database would have cost me an afternoon of fruitless searches.
If you're doing this yourself, start with the online route anyway because it saves you a drive. The Indiana Digital Newspapers portal at indiana.newspapers.com is free to use from any public library computer, and many home IP addresses work too. Filter by publication date and county. The NWI Times obits before 2008 tend to be a paragraph or two — sometimes just the survivor list with a line about the funeral home. Post-2008 pieces get longer, sometimes a full page with photographs scanned inline. The quality varies. Early 2000s scans are readable. Some 2006-era pages came through with OCR ghosts where the headline bled into the body text. One counter-intuitive thing: don't assume the full obituary lives in that single article. Funeral homes in the NWI region submitted standard death notices to multiple outlets. If your ancestor died in Hohokus, New Jersey but lived part-time in Portage, the Indiana version often mentions the out-of-state connection in the first line while the New Jersey paper carries the full biographical sketch. I found my grandmother's complete life story in a Passaic County paper while the NWI Times version just listed her as surviving at 84. Cross-referencing neighboring state archives for transients in the region will save you half your research time. The actual download process is straightforward once you locate the issue. The digitized papers run as PDFs accessible through the portal. I usually right-click the image and save the full-page file rather than downloading the bundled issue PDF, because the individual pages are easier to annotate and search later. The NWI Times obituary pages average about 400 KB each as JPEGs within the portal viewer, and downloading a single page takes maybe eight seconds on a decent connection. The bundled issue for a Wednesday edition with a full obituary section runs about 30 to 50 MB. Don't waste time trying to scrape the site — their DRM wrapper makes that a dead end, and there's no legitimate bulk export option for genealogy researchers.
What the records actually contain
A typical NWI Times obituary includes the deceased's full name, age, city of residence, date of death, surviving family members listed by relationship, predeceased relatives, the funeral home handling arrangements, and sometimes the church or organization the person belonged to. Occasional pieces mention military service, particularly for Korean War and Vietnam-era veterans. I've seen maybe one in twenty mention the cause of death, and when it does appear, it's usually phrased in generic language like "after a lengthy illness" rather than anything clinical. The dates are generally reliable — I cross-referenced about forty entries against Social Security Death Index records and found only two discrepancies where the newspaper printed an incorrect death date, usually because the family submitted the wrong day when calling the funeral home. The city listing can be misleading though. People commonly appeared under a suburb like Lowell or St. John even if they'd moved to Crown Point three years earlier, because the obituary author listed the longstanding address rather than the current one. I learned this the hard way after spending a week looking for census records in the wrong municipality.
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Common pitfalls and workarounds
Name variation is the biggest trap. The NWI Times had multiple staff writers over the decades, and the spelling of surnames shifted between them. An ancestor listed as "Kowalski" in one month might appear as "Kowalsky" the next. I built a simple wildcard search strategy using just the first name plus the approximate year range and the known children's names, which narrowed results enough that I could spot the variant spelling manually. It's slower than exact search but catches the cases the database misses. Another issue is the treatment of married women. Pre-2000 obituaries frequently listed women only as "Mrs. John Smith" with no maiden name in the headline. The full name usually appeared somewhere in the body text when listing survivors, but if you're only scanning headlines you'll miss it. I keep a spreadsheet where I record both the married name and any maiden name that surfaces in the body, because subsequent generations in the family sometimes dropped the maiden name entirely and it disappears from later records. The archives don't cover everything. The NWI Times ceased publishing around 2013, and some of its older content from before 1990 isn't fully digitized through the Indiana portal. If your research target died before 1990 in Lake County, your best bet is the Lake County Genealogical Society's microfilm collection at the Crown Point library, which holds physical copies going back to the 1970s under the predecessor publication titles. It's less convenient than an online search but fills the gap that the digital archive leaves open.
There's also the matter of burial location data. The NWI Times obituaries occasionally mention the cemetery name, but not consistently enough to rely on. When it does appear, it's typically something like "resting at Crown Hill Cemetery" rather than a specific section or plot number. If you need the exact grave location for a headstone photo or visit, plan on checking Find a Grave afterward or contacting the cemetery office directly. The newspaper text alone won't give you that level of precision. For anyone just starting out with this kind of research, the practical takeaway is that the NWI Times obituaries are worth the effort but demand a couple of specific habits to make them actually useful. Save every PDF page you pull, note the URL and access date in your research log, and don't treat the first online result as the complete record. The region's migration patterns mean your ancestor's story is often split across multiple publications and formats. You'll find the full picture faster if you expect to piece it together rather than discover it whole.
