Why Nobody Talks About Old Obituaries (Until They Need One)
The Daily Progress was a small-town newspaper that ran from 1912 to 1987 in what is now eastern Tennessee. Its obituary section is scattered across microfilm, a handful of digitized fragments, and various archival scrapbooks that nobody thought to catalog properly. If you are trying to piece together family history from this source, you are going to run into problems that genealogy forums rarely mention because most people give up before they figure out the workaround. I spent about three weeks tracking down a great-aunt who died in 1954. The index at the local historical society listed her under a nickname she hadn't used since she was twenty, and the obituary itself was printed on newsprint that had become so brittle it crumbled if you looked at it wrong. Here is what I learned doing it the hard way so you can skip ahead. The biggest issue people hit is that the Daily Progress did not use a consistent format for death notices in the 1930s and 1940s. Some were full obituaries with paragraph-length bios. Others were just a single line: "Johnson, Martha E., survived by husband and two daughters" with no dates beyond the death date. You need to know which kind you are looking at because it changes how much research time each entry will cost you. The full ones are gold. The one-liners are usually just confirmation that someone died, nothing more.
When you are actually pulling records, start with the microfilm reader at the county archive rather than any online database. The digitized versions on Ancestry and FamilySearch are incomplete and often have OCR errors that turn names into nonsense strings. I found an index that incorrectly spelled a surname as "Krzem" instead of "Kreim" and spent four hours chasing a dead branch before realizing the source file was corrupted. The microfilm version showed the correct spelling immediately. Budget about forty-five minutes per reel if you are searching by name, and roughly twenty minutes if you already know the approximate date range. One thing that trips people up is the cross-referencing problem. The Daily Progress would sometimes run a death notice on page one and then print the full obituary three days later on the community page. These are two separate entries for the same person, and if you are not checking multiple issues in sequence, you will count the person twice or miss critical details buried in the later article. I built a simple tracking spreadsheet with columns for the notice date, the follow-up date, page numbers, and a notes field for anything that appeared in one but not the other. It sounds like overkill until you are dealing with a family where three siblings all died within the same month. Another practical detail: the paper changed publishers twice during its run. The 1912 to 1941 issues were under one management style with tighter, more formal obituaries. The 1942 to 1987 stretch under different ownership ran looser, more personal pieces that sometimes included things like hobby information, workplace details, and church involvement that never appeared in the earlier period. This shift matters if you are trying to extract social history beyond just names and dates. The later obituaries are significantly richer for that purpose, but they are also less standardized, which means more time spent parsing informal writing.
If your ancestor died after 1970, check the funeral home records as a secondary source. By the early seventies, the Daily Progress was outsourcing many of its death notices to funeral homes, and the copies filed with those establishments sometimes contain information the newspaper edited out. I once found a burial location in a funeral home file that was completely absent from the published obituary. The newspaper had removed it because the family requested privacy, but the record existed elsewhere. The main limitation you need to accept is that this resource only covers people who lived within the paper's circulation area, which was roughly a fifty-mile radius around the county seat. If your family lived in a nearby town that subscribed to a different paper, the Daily Progress will have nothing on them. I encountered this when researching a cousin whose family lived just across the county line. Their deaths were recorded in the neighboring paper, not here, and I had to pivot to a completely different archive to fill the gap. There is no workaround for this geographic boundary. For anyone starting out, I recommend downloading a blank template for the tracking spreadsheet before you touch any microfilm. You will save yourself at least an hour of confusion once you have multiple entries running parallel. The whole process, from initial search to verified citations, typically takes between six and ten hours depending on how much information survives in the original print. Not everything is recoverable, and some gaps are permanent. That is just how fragile newsprint from that era turns out to be.
Get the Full Details
