Why People Actually Look Through These Old Obituaries
I started digging through the Times-Tribune archives last year because I needed to confirm a birth date for a distant relative. I thought it would take thirty minutes. It took three weeks. Not because the material was inaccessible, but because nobody had properly indexed the microfiche by name alone. You learn fast that searching obituary records is more complicated than typing a last name into a box and waiting. The Times-Tribune has been publishing since the late 1800s in northeastern Pennsylvania. That gives you roughly a century and a half of death notices, full obituaries, marriage announcements that doubled as social records, and the occasional editor's note that accidentally reveals more than intended. Most people treat this as genealogy fuel. It is, but it is also something else. Local business listings appear alongside obituaries. Church societies are mentioned. A 1923 death notice for a mill worker from Carbondale tells you more about the local economy than any textbook from that era.
Unveiling The Rich History Of Times Tribune Obituaries A Treasure Trove Of Stories
Here is the straightforward way to actually access these records and not waste your time: Step one: figure out which format you are working with. The Times-Tribune went through a massive transition. Pre-1997 material is primarily on microfiche and microfilm at the Lackawanna County Historical Society and the Scranton Public Library's local history room. Post-1997 material started appearing on their website, but the online archive is spotty. Some years are fully digitized. Other years exist only in paper form and were never scanned. I found myself staring at a blank page on their site for the entire summer of 1991 before I accepted that I needed to go to the library in person. Step two: learn the filing system. At the Scranton Public Library, the microfiche cards are organized by year, then by month. Within each month, the obituaries are not alphabetized. They appear in the order they ran in the paper. This matters because if you are looking for someone who died on a specific date, you need that date before you walk in the door. Otherwise you are flipping through 300 fiche cards per month. Each card holds roughly 98 frames. I spent four hours one afternoon looking for a single obituary from October 1974 because the index only gave me the month, not the day. After that, I started calling the reference desk ahead of time and asking them to pull the exact week I needed. It saved me most of the pain.
Step three: photograph everything properly. The library allows photos of the microfiche screens, but the resolution drops badly. If you are doing this for serious research, bring a camera with manual controls and use a phone adapter that mounts over the viewer. The images come out cleaner and you can read crossed-out names and handwritten margin notes that digital scans sometimes blur out. I once found a mother's maiden name written in pencil next to a 1952 obituary that the digitized version had simply omitted. That detail resolved a branch of my family tree I had been stuck on for two years. Step four: cross-reference with other local sources. The Catholic churches in the Scranton area kept their own records, and many of those are now available through the Diocese archives. If your ancestor was Irish or Italian, the Times-Tribune obituary might only say they were "a devoted mother of seven." The church burial record will give you the exact plot location and sometimes the immigration ship name. I paired a 1938 Times-Tribune death notice with a St. Patrick's Church burial card and discovered the person had arrived in Philadelphia in 1906 under a slightly different spelling of their surname. The obituary had used the anglicized version. The church record had the original. There are some things these records will not do for you, and you should know about them before you invest serious time.
Get the Full Details
The biggest gap is the period between 1918 and 1920. Flu season obituaries spiked enormously, and the paper sometimes published multiple death notices on a single page without individual formatting. Names get compressed. Addresses get truncated. A researcher could easily merge two different people into one entry if they are not careful. I encountered this when I thought I had found a great-grand uncle who lived in Dunmore. He did not. It was two men from different neighborhoods whose obituaries appeared back to back on the same page, and the microfiche frame boundary had split the two stories awkwardly. I caught the mistake only because I noticed the same street name appearing in both columns. Another limitation: the coverage is not evenly distributed across neighborhoods. Areas like Oak Summit and Archbald received less consistent obituary coverage than central Scranton or Mountain Top. If your family lived in a smaller surrounding community, you may need to check the Wilkes-Barre Gazette or the Pittston Gazette as well. The regional papers sometimes reprinted obituaries from smaller dailies, but not always. Relying solely on the Times-Tribune will leave holes in your research, especially for the 1940s and earlier. The online version of the archive has improved, but it has its own problems. The search function treats "Mary" and "Mary" as different queries sometimes, and the date range selector glitches if you try to go beyond ten-year blocks. I learned to search in two-year increments and to try alternate spellings manually. It adds time but it catches entries the automated system misses.
If you need a full list of obituaries for a specific neighborhood or ethnic community, the newspaper does not publish that. You have to compile it yourself by going through the microfilm month by month and recording every entry that matches your criteria. I built a simple spreadsheet for this. Column one for the date, column two for the full name, column three for age, column four for the street address, column five for any referenced funeral home, and column six for a rough transcription of the text. It took me about six weeks to process fifty years of records this way, but the resulting dataset let me map migration patterns within Scranton that I had never seen in any published history book. One practical tip that nobody seems to mention: the librarians who work the local history section remember regulars. If you show up consistently and ask thoughtful questions, they will pull files from storage that are not listed in the public catalog. I found a box of clippings from 1962 to 1968 that had been removed from the main archive during a renovation and stored in the basement. They were not on any index card. The head librarian remembered them because she had boxed them up herself twenty years earlier. She dug them out and brought them up without me having to file a formal request. This kind of access does not happen if you are a first-time visitor asking for everything at once. It happens when you come back three or four times and show that you actually understand the material. The Times-Tribune obituaries are not a perfect record. They are biased toward property owners, church attendees, and people with living relatives who could afford the advertising fees for longer notices. Poor families, renters, and people who died alone often received minimal or no coverage. A full obituary in this paper during the 1950s could cost the family several dollars per line. That is roughly equivalent to fifteen or twenty dollars today. Some families chose a one-line notice instead. You have to read between those lines to understand what is missing, and that is where the real history lives.
