How to Actually Use the Chattanooga Times Archive for Genealogy Work
The Chattanooga Times obituary archive is one of those resources that looks straightforward but has enough quirks to waste an afternoon if you approach it wrong. I spent roughly two years doing serious research through these records for clients, and the database has changed hands enough times that finding what you need requires knowing which portal is currently active and what index gaps exist. The Chattanooga Times first published obituaries in the late 1800s, but the real volume started picking up after World War II. The Times merged with the Chattanooga Daily News in 1975 to become the Times Free Press, which is what most people encounter now. If you're searching for someone who died before 1975, you will likely hit paywalls or incomplete microfilm at the Hamilton County Public Library. After 1975, digital access is considerably better but not uniform. Here is the practical workflow. Start at timesfreepress.com if you are looking for post-1975 records, since they run an obituary search tool on their site. The search function only goes back to about 2000 reliably. Anything older than that usually requires navigating to their archive section or contacting the newsroom directly. The free tier on their site gives you access to recently digitized records, but full obituary text for older entries often sits behind their subscription wall.
For pre-1975 work, the Hamilton County Public Library on Broad Street holds the original microfilm. I found the cataloging system there to be inconsistent. They have an online card catalog, but it is not fully searchable by death date. I once spent forty-five minutes tracking down a microfilm reel number before realizing the card for the wrong decade was filed under "T" instead of the correct location. The workaround was asking the reference librarian for the physical inventory log they keep at the circulation desk. That log lists every reel with its exact date range. It is handwritten in a binder and has not been updated in years, but it is the only reliable way to know which reel contains which months. The Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville also holds Chattanooga Times microfilm collections. They are less convenient geographically, but their online database is more organized. You can search their Tennessee Encyclopedia of Culture and History portal, which includes some Chattanooga obituary indexes. The coverage there is spotty. I have found complete obituaries for certain months in 1942 and 1968 that do not appear in any other index I have tried. Another option that people overlook is Ancestry.com. They have a "Tennessee, U.S., Obituary Collection" that includes Chattanooga Times and Times Free Press entries. The indexing quality varies wildly between years. Some runs are fully OCR-searchable, while others are merely browsable by image. I discovered that the years from 1985 to 1993 on Ancestry are image-only with no text search, meaning you have to scroll through individual pages to find an entry. That is not ideal when you are looking for a common surname like Smith or Johnson during a period when obituaries ran almost daily.
FamilySearch has some Chattanooga Times obituary records linked through their Tennessee collection, but the coverage is fragmentary. I would not recommend relying on it as a primary source. It is useful as a supplementary check when you have already found a record elsewhere and want to verify details. The real value of these obituaries goes beyond names and dates. The longer pieces from the 1950s through the 1970s often include details about survival, military service, employer, and church affiliation that are not available in any other public record. I once found a man's World War I draft card was misfiled under his brother's name. The correct draft card was hidden in his own obituary from 1967, which mentioned his exact unit and discharge date. That single paragraph resolved a client's entire branch of the family tree. One counter-intuitive thing about researching these archives: the index is not always your best friend. Newspaper OCR misreads surnames constantly. A "Ch" at the start of a name might be read as "Kn" or "Gn." I learned to browse the actual pages for a given week rather than rely on search results. If you are looking for a family where the surname might be misspelled in the index, pull up the digital page images for the relevant dates and scan manually. It takes longer upfront but saves you from missing the record entirely.
Get the Full Details
Another issue is that some obituaries were listed under the spouse's name rather than the deceased. I encountered this regularly in the 1940s and 1950s when women's obituaries were often published with minimal detail or were omitted entirely in favor of a reference in the husband's obituary. If you are researching a woman who died before 1950, check the obituary of her husband, father, or adult son as a secondary source. For those willing to travel, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Biographical Society maintains a local history collection that includes compiled obituary indexes from various Chattanooga newspapers. Their work is not digitized in a way that is easy to search online, but a visit or a phone call to them can save you from pulling dozens of microfilm reels. They have already done the heavy lifting of cross-referencing death dates with publication dates across multiple publications. The main bottleneck with this entire process is that no single source has complete coverage. You will likely need to check at least two repositories for any pre-1975 death record to be reasonably confident you have the full text. Post-1995 records are mostly available digitally but often require a paid subscription to either the newspaper or a genealogy platform. The cost adds up quickly if you are doing serious research, so it is worth budgeting for at least one month of access to a database like Newspapers.com or Ancestry before committing to a long-term plan.
