Searching Midland Daily News Obituaries: What Actually Works
The Midland Daily News has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, and if you are trying to research a specific person or trace a family line through them, you are going to run into a number of frustrating dead ends before you figure out the system. I spent about three weeks last year digging through their archives for a great-aunt who died in 1963, and what I learned is worth sharing before you waste your own time. The obituary collection lives primarily on the newspaper's website at mdn.net and through subscription databases like GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com. The free portion is limited to roughly the last five years. Anything older requires a paid subscription or an in-person visit to the Midland Public Library, which maintains microfilm copies dating back to the paper's founding. That library has a proper genealogy room with readers that actually work, unlike a lot of municipal archives I have dealt with. Here is how the actual search process works. On mdn.net, you go to the obituaries section and use the search filter. You can narrow by name, date range, and location. The search index is not perfect. It misses entries where the formatting was odd or where a middle name or initial caused the parser to skip the record. I learned this the hard way. I was looking for an obituary for "Robert James Miller" and the search returned nothing. I eventually found it by browsing the printed PDF of that week's paper manually. The database had indexed him as "Bob Miller" because the original submission used his nickname on the byline, and the scraping algorithm treated them as two different people.
For deeper research, GenealogyBank is the most usable platform. Their obituary search interface lets you filter by state, county, and exact date. The OCR quality on Midland Daily News issues from 1990 onward is generally good enough to read. Pre-1990 material is hit or miss depending on whether the newspaper was typeset digitally or set in lead type. Lead type scans tend to have more noise, and the full-text search will skip over garbled characters. I ran into this with a 1947 obituary where the surname had a smudge that turned the "H" into something the OCR read as an "A." I found the record only because I switched to browsing the page images directly instead of relying on text search. The library route is worth considering if you are doing serious genealogical work. The Midland Public Library has microfilm for the entire run. You can request a specific date range ahead of time and save yourself the trip if the film is checked out or the reader is broken. I once went there on a Tuesday morning and the microfilm machine for 1950s issues was out of order. The staff let me use a backup reader, but it took twice as long because the focus wheel was stiff. Always call ahead and confirm the equipment status if you are traveling from outside the area. What most people miss about these archives is that obituaries in this paper did not always follow a standard format. Before the 1980s, many were written by the family in a few paragraphs rather than the structured death notice format the paper started using later. A death notice is the brief, factual listing with funeral home details. An obituary is the longer narrative piece. Both appear in the same section, but they contain different information. The death notices are better for dates and locations. The obituaries are better for biographical details, surviving relatives, and personal history. You need to know which one you are looking at, or you will waste time scrolling through text that does not have the facts you need.
Another thing nobody tells you: the paper sometimes published supplementary death pages on Sundays that contained multiple obituaries in one spread. These are easy to miss if you are only searching for a single name and jumping between results. I found a second obituary for my great-aunt that I would have missed entirely because the first one was listed under her maiden name in the index, and the second, more detailed one was on a grouped death page under her married name. The index did not cross-reference them. If you need obituaries from before the digital era and you cannot get to the library, Newspapers.com has a decent portion of the Midland Daily News microfilm digitized. It is not complete for every year, but it covers significant stretches. The subscription is not cheap, so if you only need a handful of records, a single-month plan might be enough. I usually sign up for one month, download everything I need in PDF format, then cancel before the next cycle. The downloads are high resolution enough to read fine print, which matters when you are looking at signatures or small print in funeral home addresses. The biggest bottleneck in this whole process is that the Midland Daily News does not maintain a publicly accessible, fully searchable database of every obituary ever published. The digitization is partial, the OCR has gaps, and the index entries are sometimes inconsistent. You will hit walls. When that happens, your options are the library microfilm, Newspapers.com, or reaching out to the newspaper's archives department directly. They are not always responsive, but they can sometimes tell you whether a specific issue exists or point you toward a donation copy they hold off-site.
Get the Full Details
I have been pulling these records for about eight years now, and the workflow that consistently works for me is this: start with a free search on mdn.net for recent deaths, move to GenealogyBank for 1990 to 2015, use Newspapers.com for the earlier window, and fall back to the library microfilm for anything before 1990 or when the digital records fail. It takes patience, but it covers the vast majority of cases without requiring repeated visits or expensive subscriptions across multiple platforms.
