Local Obituaries Are Basically Your First Stop For Franklin County Genealogy
The Record Herald in Waynesboro has been running obituaries for over a century, and they are actually useful when you are trying to piece together family history in south-central Pennsylvania. Most people treat them as a simple death announcement, but the format has shifted enough over the decades that you need to know what you are looking for depending on which era the record comes from. Starting in the early 1900s, obituaries in the Record Herald were often just a few lines printed alongside the death notice. The funeral home handled most of the logistics, and the paper charged by the line or by the inch, so families kept things tight. If someone wanted a longer tribute, they paid extra. That pricing structure is why you see such a wide variance in length even within the same decade. By the 1970s and 1980s, the obituary section became a dedicated space. Editors started encouraging families to submit full bios instead of just the bare minimum. That is when you get the richer records: maiden names, parents' names, employers, military service, and surviving siblings all showing up in one coherent block of text. The transition wasn't sudden though. You will find gaps where the format was inconsistent, especially around 1968 to 1972, which is roughly when the shift happened.
I ran into a specific problem a while back when researching a great-uncle who died in 1974. The obituary was shorter than usual, and the funeral home listed didn't match any I had seen before. I spent about forty minutes cross-referencing microfilm because the online index had a typo in the date. The workaround was straightforward: I pulled the actual printed issue from the Franklin County Historical Society's microfilm collection and found the correct funeral home listed in the adjacent ad column. The obit itself had been typeset with a wrong date, but the surrounding ads confirmed the actual publication date. Always check the adjacent advertisements when the metadata looks off. The digital archives available through the Record Herald's website go back to roughly 1997, which covers the later decades well but leaves the earlier period almost entirely offline. The newspaper's own search tool indexes by name and date range, but it occasionally misses entries that were published on pages the scanner missed or that were printed in a folded section rather than the main obit column. I have also seen cases where a double-page spread was only partially scanned, so an obituary that should appear in the results simply does not show up at all. This is a real limitation you need to plan around. For records before 1997, your best bet is the microfilm at the Waynesboro public library or the Franklin County courthouse archives. The library staff are used to genealogy requests and will pull the correct reels if you give them a name and a date range. Budget about twenty to thirty minutes for the actual pull and review, assuming the microfilm is in decent shape, which it usually is. Some reels from the mid-1980s have suffered minor image degradation due to storage conditions, but the text remains readable at standard magnification.
One thing beginners consistently miss is that the Record Herald did not always publish a separate obituary. Sometimes a death was noted only in the daily news section with a brief paragraph, especially in the 1950s and earlier. If a search returns nothing, check the general news coverage for that week. The death might be buried in a routine community bulletin rather than the dedicated section. This is true across most small-town Pennsylvania papers, not just the Record Herald. Another counter-intuitive detail: full-text searches on the digitized archive are not always reliable for older entries because the OCR quality drops significantly after about 1990. Names like Schneider or Stover can come back as "Scneider" or "Srover" depending on how the font was scanned. Running alternate spellings manually adds maybe ten minutes to a search, but it dramatically improves your hit rate compared to relying solely on the automated tool. If you need a citation for research purposes, the standard format includes the deceased's full name, the publication date, the section if applicable, and the URL or microfilm reel number. The Record Herald does not assign permanent DOIs to its archive entries, so you will need to note the specific page or image number if you want a traceable reference. That detail matters if anyone else needs to verify the source later.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries from this paper are particularly valuable for tracking migration patterns within Franklin County because so many long-time residents died locally and were buried at Greenwood Cemetery or one of the nearby church yards. The surviving relatives listed in the obituary often include children who moved out of state, which gives you a concrete lead for following the family tree forward. I have found at least a dozen out-of-state cousins this way over the years, usually by matching a name mentioned in the obituary to a census record or a Social Security Death Index entry. There is no single download link that covers the entire archive, and no complete public database exists. The Record Herald's website provides access to its own digital archive on a subscription or pay-per-article basis. Beyond that, the local historical society maintains its own physical and microfiche collections. Neither source is comprehensive on its own, so using both in combination is the only reliable approach for serious research.
