Reading Old Obituaries From The Richmond Times Dispatch
If you're digging through the Richmond Times Dispatch archives for obituaries, you quickly learn that the paper itself is not organized the way you might expect. The microfilm runs chronologically, not alphabetically, and the obituaries themselves are scattered across pages 1 through 80 depending on the day. I spent about three weeks last fall just getting comfortable with the scanning equipment at the Valentine Museum's reading room before I figured out a workflow that didn't waste my time. What follows is basically what I learned. The Richmond Times Dispatch began publishing obituaries regularly in the late 1800s, but the real consistency starts around 1920 when they adopted a more standardized format. Before that, you're dealing with everything from two-line death notices to multi-column biographical sketches, sometimes placed next to advertisements for pianos or patent medicine. The formatting inconsistency is actually useful if you know what you're looking for, because it tells you something about the family's social standing and the newspaper's editorial priorities at the time. Here's the thing most genealogy forums don't mention: the RTD obituaries from the 1940s through the 1980s are the most valuable and the most frustrating simultaneously. They contain detailed biographical information, military service records, and surviving family member names, but they were almost never indexed by the newspaper itself. You have to read them linearly or use secondary finding aids. The Library of Virginia has a partial name index for obituaries from 1950 to 1995, but it covers only about 60 percent of entries and has transcription errors. I found this out the hard way when I spent four hours tracking down a misspelled surname using the LVA index only to discover the actual obituary had a completely different spelling.
Where To Find The Material
The primary sources break down like this: Richmond Public Library - Central Branch: They have RTD microfilm from 1850 onward, though coverage has gaps between 1914 and 1918 due to a warehouse fire. The microfilm readers here are older machines with poor focus adjustment, so bring your own glasses if you wear them. There's also a printed subject index card file for the years 1970 through 1999 that can save you significant time if the names are spelled correctly in their system. The Valentine Richmond History Center: They hold the institutional papers of the RTD and have stronger material on editorial decisions and the paper's early obituary practices. Their finding aids are better curated than the library's, and the staff there knows where the gaps are. I used their collection to verify a discrepancy between two versions of the same obituary from 1953.
Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com: The digitized RTD collection starts around 1993 on most platforms, which means anything before that date requires physical or microfilm research. The OCR on the digitized versions from the 1990s and 2000s is decent but far from perfect, especially with older typefaces. I've found that searching with wildcard variants of surnames catches about 80 percent of hits; the remaining 20 percent require manual page-by-page browsing. Virginia State Library: They have overlapping microfilm collections and occasionally hold RTD editorial correspondence that explains why certain obituaries were expanded or shortened. This is more useful for researchers studying media history than family historians, but it does provide context for abrupt changes in obituary length during wartime periods.
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A Specific Problem And How I Worked Around It
I ran into a particularly annoying situation researching a great-aunt who died in 1972. Her name was registered as "Eleanor Marguerite Thomas" in census records but the obituary listed her as "E. M. Thomas." The LVA index had her under "Thomas" but misspelled her given name as "Margaret." I'd already pulled the wrong microfilm reel because of the name variant, wasting about an hour and a half. The workaround was to pivot to city directory records from the same period. Richmond city directories listed her address at 2208 Bayview Avenue in 1970 and 1971, which I cross-referenced with the RTD's neighborhood-based news sections. The obituary was actually on page 42 of the June 14, 1972 edition, buried between a sports recap and a real estate advertisement. I never would have found it by searching her name alone. After that, I started using address-to-obituary cross-referencing as a standard step whenever name searches came up empty.
What The Obituaries Actually Tell You
Beyond the basic death date and surviving relatives, RTD obituaries are a surprisingly rich demographic source. The military service sections alone can confirm branch, rank, and campaign participation for veterans who might otherwise be unaccounted for in federal records. I've pulled service information from obituaries that filled gaps in my own family's VA file. The social and organizational affiliations mentioned in these notices—church membership, union local numbers, fraternal orders, workplace tenure—provide context that vital records simply don't capture. A 1965 obituary might note that the deceased was a "member of Local 47 of the Teamsters" for forty-two years, which gives you a union contact, a geographic anchor, and an employment history in one sentence. There are also editorial quirks worth understanding. Between 1958 and 1976, the RTD ran a policy of including the cause of death in most obituaries unless the family specifically requested omission. After that period, cause-of-death language became rarer, likely due to changing social norms around privacy. If you're researching someone who died between those dates and the obituary doesn't mention a cause, that might itself be significant.
Limitations And Where This Approach Falls Apart
The biggest limitation is access cost and time. Microfilm research at the Richmond Public Library runs about $0.50 per 30-second clip for reproduction, and a single thorough search can easily generate twenty or thirty clips. The Valentine charges reading room fees for non-members. Digitized access through Newspapers.com requires a subscription that runs roughly $150 annually, and even then the pre-1993 content isn't included. Another hard constraint: the RTD's own archival practices before the 1990s were inconsistent. Some editions were microfilmed immediately, others were stored in paper form and microfilmed later during consolidation projects. This means certain months or years may have lower image quality or missing pages. I encountered a stretch from March through May 1961 where the microfilm had significant degradation, making key passages nearly illegible even at maximum magnification. If you're working with RTD obituaries for legal purposes or formal documentation, you'll need certified copies from the newspaper or the Richmond Department of Health's vital records division. The microfilm images alone won't satisfy most institutional requirements. For casual genealogical research, they're perfectly adequate, but that distinction matters if you're building a case file or applying for heritage society membership.
The other issue is geographic bias. Richmond's obituary coverage skews heavily toward white, middle-class, and church-attached residents. Black obituaries in the RTD before desegregation were sparse and often placed in secondary sections. The religious and community newspapers like the Richmond Afro-American carried fuller coverage for the Black community, and cross-referencing both publications is essential for anyone researching African American Richmond families from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the obituaries are what families chose to submit and what editors chose to publish. They reflect editorial judgment, family wealth, and social expectations as much as factual biography. An obituary that runs three columns with a photograph tells you something about the family's resources and the deceased's social capital, while a one-line notice tells you the opposite. Reading them literally without accounting for that variance will produce inaccurate conclusions about a person's life and standing.
