How To Actually Use Gila Herald Obituaries For Historical Research
The Gila Herald is the newspaper of record for the Gila River Valley in eastern Arizona, primarily serving the towns around Globe, Miami, and Clifton. Their obituary section runs every week, and like most regional papers, it has been publishing notices since the early 1900s. If you are digging into family history or local community research in Gila County, these obituaries are genuinely useful. They are not a silver bullet, but they fill gaps that census records and vital records offices leave open. Here is how I approach this research. First, you need to understand what you are actually looking at. Gila Herald obituaries are typically one to three paragraphs long. They list the deceased person's full name, age at death, date of death, and surviving family members. Sometimes they include the name of the funeral home, the service location, and occasionally the cause of death. The later entries, from the 1980s onward, tend to be more detailed. The older ones are terse. A 1923 obituary might read something like "Mrs. Mary E. Carney, age 67, died Tuesday at her home on West Cliff Street after a brief illness." That is it. Nothing about parents, siblings, or military service unless the family specifically provided it. The physical archive sits at the Gila County Public Library in Globe. They have microfilm going back to the paper's founding in 1893. The microfilm reader is old but functional. I spent a Saturday there last year pulling reels for the 1945 to 1955 period. The film is in decent shape but some of the earlier reels from the 1910s have edge damage. Scrolling through microfilm takes time. You can request copies of individual pages for a small fee, or you can photograph them with your own camera if the library allows it. They let you do this at the reference desk.
Digitally, the situation is mixed. The Gila Herald has a website, but their online archive only goes back roughly to 2010. Before that, you are working with microfilm or printed bound volumes. Some third-party databases like Ancestry and FamilySearch have indexed portions of the Gila Herald, but the coverage is incomplete. I found about 60 percent of the obituaries from 1960 to 1990 on FamilySearch, and the indexing quality is uneven. Some names are misspelled. The dates are sometimes off by a day or two because the indexer matched the publication date rather than the death date listed in the text. One thing people miss when they start researching these obituaries is that many residents of the Gila River Valley were buried in cemeteries that no longer have marked graves, or the markers have weathered away. The paper sometimes lists the cemetery in the obituary. I ran into this when researching a great-uncle who died in 1952. The obituary said he was buried at the Miami Cemetery, which is also known as the Shellsberg Cemetery. When I went to locate the grave, I found that several headstones in that section had been removed or flattened during road expansion work in the 1970s. The obituary was the only thing confirming his burial location. Without it, I would have had nothing. Another practical detail: the Gila Herald was not the only paper in the area. The Clifton Advance and the Superior Star covered neighboring towns. If your ancestor lived near the county line, check those papers too. I once spent two hours searching the Gila Herald for an obituary that turned out to be in the Clifton Advance because the family lived on the wrong side of the municipal boundary. It happens more often than you would think.
If you want to access the microfilm yourself, here is the basic procedure. Go to the Gila County Public Library at 200 East Ash Street in Globe. Ask for the Gila Herald microfilm at the reference desk. Tell them the date range you need. They will pull the reels and set you up at the reader. Bring your own USB drive if you want to save digital copies of the pages you photograph. The machine has a built-in camera attachment that saves to USB. It works, though the resolution is not great. I usually re-photograph anything I plan to use in a published genealogy report because the microfilm output is grainy. For those who cannot visit in person, the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records in Phoenix has a complete microfilm collection of the Gila Herald. It is a longer trip, but if you are already doing research at the state archives, it is worth pulling the reels while you are there. The reading room has better lighting and more comfortable equipment than the local library. There are limitations you should know about. The Gila Herald did not always publish obituaries for everyone. transient workers, Native American residents of the nearby reservations, and Mexican-American community members were sometimes omitted or listed under shortened names. The paper served a predominantly Anglo population for most of its history, and the editorial decisions reflected that. If you are researching ancestors from those communities, you will need to supplement the Gila Herald with records from the San Carlos Apache Agency, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, or county health department files.
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Another limitation is that obituaries are written by families or funeral homes, not by the newspaper staff. The information is only as accurate as the person who submitted it. I found an obituary where the death date was listed three days after the actual burial date. The family had simply confused the dates when they filled out the submission form. Always cross-reference with the Arizona Death Certificate database if you need confirmed dates. The real value of these obituaries goes beyond individual family lines. Reading through decades of them gives you a picture of the community. You see patterns in occupation, migration, and health. The copper mining boom of the 1910s left a clear mark. Multiple obituaries from that period list "concrete worker" or "miner" as the occupation, and there is a spike in respiratory-related deaths. The 1930s show out-migration. Younger adults disappear from the obituary rolls as families leave for California and other states during the Depression. The postwar years bring an influx of new surnames as people moved in for jobs at the Phelps Dodge operations. If you want to get started quickly, begin with what you already know. Take the name of the person you are researching and work backward through known dates. Pull the microfilm for the five-year window around their death. Read the surrounding obituaries too, not just the one you are looking for. Neighbors and extended family often appear next to each other in the paper. I found a whole branch of my wife's family by reading the obituaries adjacent to my target because her grandmother's sister had died two weeks earlier and was buried in the same service.
The Gila County Genealogical Society also maintains a card index of obituaries from the Herald. It is not digitized, but you can request a search by mail or in person. They charge a small fee per name, but it saves hours of microfilm scrolling if you already have a specific person in mind. For anyone serious about this kind of research, I recommend keeping a simple spreadsheet. Log the date of the obituary, the full name as printed, any family members mentioned, the cemetery listed, and where you found the record. You will forget details faster than you think, and having a clean log makes it much easier to return to a source later.
