Looking at Old Obituaries From The Times Leader In Wilkes Barre
Most people looking for obituaries from the Times Leader in Wilkes Barre are trying to fill in gaps in their family tree or find details that birth and death certificates don't give you. The paper has been publishing local obituaries since the late 1800s, and the archives are actually useful if you know how to dig through them. The basic problem is that the website's search interface is clunky and the older records aren't all digitized in a way that's easy to browse. Start by going to the Times Leader's official site and using their archive search. The paywall is real though. Without a subscription you can see titles and dates but the actual text of older obituaries is usually behind the meter. The free route is to go through the Pennsylvania State University's newspapers program or check if Luzerne County has a partnership with Newspapers.com or GenealogyBank. Those subscriptions tend to cover the Times Leader going back quite far. When you do get in, search by the person's full name plus the approximate year. Wildcards help sometimes but the OCR quality on these pages is inconsistent. A typo in the database index can make a perfectly good obit completely invisible in your results. I spent about forty minutes hunting for a great-uncle who I knew had died in 1997 because the name was indexed as "Kosloski" instead of "Koslosky" and the misspelling went all the way back to the original manuscript. The workaround was to browse the actual microfilm scan page by page around that date range instead of relying on the text search. That took longer upfront but found it in about ten minutes once I stopped trusting the index.
What You Actually Find In These Obituaries
A standard modern obituary from the Times Leader gives you the person's full name, age at death, residence, surviving family members, funeral home, and service details. The stuff that matters to researchers is buried in there. Sibling names, parents' names, the town they grew up in before moving to Wilkes Barre, military service branches, union affiliations, church memberships. All of that is useful primary source material. The older obituaries from the 1920s through the 1950s are shorter but sometimes denser. They tended to list more geographic detail because the community was smaller and everyone knew where you came from. An obituary from 1934 might mention you were born in a specific town in Luzerne County and attended a particular school. That kind of detail doesn't show up in modern obits the same way. One thing most people miss is that the funeral directory often runs alongside the obituary. The funeral home notice will sometimes include the pastor's name, the specific church, and burial location. Cross-referencing the obituary text with the funeral card gives you double the data points for the same person. I always pull both together before I move on to the next record.
Common Problems And How To Handle Them
Clipped obituaries are a real issue. If a family could only afford the minimum column inches, the obit might be two paragraphs long with bare essentials. No extended family, no biography, just a death date and a funeral time. This is especially common during the Depression era and the 1940s when newspaper rates were higher relative to what families could spend. You have to work around those by pulling census records, city directories, and social security indices for the same person. Another problem is duplicate names. Wilkes Barre had a huge immigrant population from Poland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Surnames like Nowak, Kowalski, Rossi, and Marino show up constantly. You cannot rely on the name alone. You need the middle initial, the wife's maiden name, the street address, or the father's name to separate two men named Joseph Nowak who both died in the same year. The digitization quality drops off significantly for issues before 1970. Some pages are readable. Some are blurry enough that letters run together. The OCR picks up fragments and misses whole lines. Always verify what you read by looking at the actual image, not just the searchable text. I once spent time trying to trace a lineage based on an OCR error that turned "St. Mary's" into "St. Mark's" and led me down a completely wrong church record path.
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Alternatives If The Times Leader Archive Isn't Enough
If the papers online aren't giving you what you need, the Luzerne County Courthouse keeps physical records. Death certificates filed with the county are another layer of detail. The state repository in Harrisburg also holds copies. For earlier periods when the Times Leader might not have carried every obituary, the Wilkes-Barre Gazette and the Wilkes-Barre Record both ran competing coverage. A person might have a full obit in one paper and a clipped version in the other. FamilySearch and Ancestry both have some Times Leader obituary collections but they are incomplete. The coverage is spotty and heavily weighted toward the later decades. Don't treat those databases as the full record. Treat them as a supplement to the original paper archives. The practical take is that the Times Leader obituaries are a solid resource but they require patience and a habit of checking multiple sources for the same person. The digitized versions save time on recent decades but the older material still rewards people who are willing to look past the search box and actually browse the page images. That is where the useful information lives.
