Accessing Old Obituaries From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Archive
If you are looking for an obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive, the process is not as simple as one search box. The archive spans several decades and the formatting changed over time. I have spent more hours than I want to admit digging through these records, and the main issue most people hit is that the current website does not index everything equally well. The older articles, especially from before 2010, often require a different approach than what the front page suggests. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette now hosts its obituary content through PittLive. You can go to pittsburghlive.com and navigate to the obituaries section. From there, you can search by name, date range, and location. The search works reasonably well for obituaries published after about 2014. For anything earlier, the index becomes spotty. The site did a major overhaul a few years back and a lot of the legacy content got shuffled around. If a direct name search returns nothing, it does not necessarily mean the obituary never ran. It might just mean it is not in the searchable metadata. The real depth of this archive comes from understanding what is actually available and where it lives. The Post-Gazette has been publishing since 1786, but the obituary section as a consistent feature really took off in the mid-twentieth century. The paper covered a wide swath of western Pennsylvania, including Pittsburgh proper and the surrounding counties. That means the archive is not limited to city residents. People from Allegheny, Beaver, Washington, and Westmoreland counties all appear in these pages.
What most people do not realize is that the text of older obituaries is not always fully OCR'd. The Post-Gazette digitized a massive backfile, but the optical character recognition quality drops off significantly for issues before the early 2000s. I ran into this directly when I was tracking down a great-uncle who died in 1987. A plain text search for his name turned up nothing. The obituary existed, but the OCR had mangled his surname into something unreadable. The workaround was to go to the digital edition viewer and manually flip through pages around the expected date. I used his known death date from the county records, narrowed it to a five-day window, and found the page by eye. It was sitting three pages into the obituary section. That process took about forty minutes. A full-text search would have returned zero results.
The PDF And Microfilm Route
When the online search fails, the next stop is the library route. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library has a microfilm and print collection that includes the full Post-Gazette archive going back to the nineteenth century. They also have PDF scans of many issues that are not yet available online. If you are doing serious genealogical research, you should plan to visit in person or request a research consultation. Staff there can pull files faster than you can navigate the broken search filters on the newspaper's website. For those outside the area, Interlibrary Loan is an option, but it is slow. You will typically wait two to three weeks for a copy of a specific issue. If you need multiple issues, the cost adds up quickly. Some regional historical societies in western Pennsylvania also hold copies of the Post-Gazette on microfilm, including the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society. Checking with them first can save you a trip to Pittsburgh if they already have what you need on reel.
Get the Full Details
Paywalls And Free Access
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette operates a subscription model for its digital archive. You generally get a small number of free articles per month before the paywall kicks in. For obituary research, this can be frustrating because you might need to view fifteen or twenty issues to find one record. The library route bypasses this entirely. Most public libraries in the Pittsburgh area offer free access to the Post-Gazette archive through their digital databases, often via services like PressReader or the newspaper's own library portal. Walk into any branch of the Carnegie Library system and ask about archival access. They will point you in the right direction without making you feel like you are asking for a favor. Obituaries in the Post-Gazette are written by family members or funeral homes, not by the newspaper's editorial staff. That means the content varies wildly in quality and completeness. Some are detailed biographical sketches. Others are two paragraphs listing survivors. The later the date, the more likely you are to find genealogical gold: maiden names, military service, church affiliation, places of work, and lists of surviving relatives. Older obituaries tend to be thinner. A death notice from the 1950s might just state the name, age, and funeral home. Do not assume the person died without being noted. Sometimes the family could not afford a full obituary and opted for the cheaper notice. Those still contain usable data points. One common mistake is assuming the death date in the obituary matches the actual date of death. Funerals are usually scheduled a few days after death, and the obituary runs either the day of or the day before the service. The death date listed inside the text is sometimes off by a day or two from the official record. Always verify against the Pennsylvania Death Certificate if you are building a family tree. The Post-Gazette archive will not give you the exact cause of death in most cases either. Newspapers typically avoid that detail unless the family specifically requests it.
Advanced Search Tactics
If you need to dig deeper, try searching by the funeral home name rather than the deceased person's name. Many families in the Pittsburgh area used the same funeral homes for generations. Butler Brothers, Callahan-McCormick, and Brown & Sons are long-standing names in the area. Searching the funeral home plus a year range can surface multiple family members who were never linked by a direct name search. This is especially useful when dealing with spelling variations or anglicized names. Another tactic that rarely gets mentioned is searching the society pages. The Post-Gazette used to run social notices alongside obituaries, including announcements of memorial services, church gatherings, and relief committee meetings. These can fill gaps when the actual obituary is thin or missing. A quick search for the person's name plus the word "memorial" or "service" in the same date range often surfaces supplementary material that helps round out the picture.
When The Archive Fails Completely
Sometimes nothing works. The Post-Gazette archive has gaps, particularly from the 1930s and earlier, where some issues are missing from both the print and digital holdings. If you hit a dead end, check the Index to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which is held at Hillman Library. It lists every obituary and notice by name and date, even when the full text is unavailable. The index itself is searchable on microfilm. It will at least confirm whether the person appeared in the paper, even if the actual article is lost. For records from before 1900, you may also want to look at the Pittsburgh Times and the Pittsburgh Press archives. Both papers covered the same general area and many families placed obituaries in multiple publications. The Press-Gazette merger in 1990 means some crossover exists, but the earlier Press content lives in a separate archive system. Checking both gives you a better shot at finding the record you need.
