Unveiling The Treasures Of Murray Ledger Obituaries A Window To The Past

Reading Old Obituaries From The Murray Ledger

I spend more time than I probably should digging through old newspaper archives. A few years ago I was trying to track down a great-aunt who died in the late 1960s, and her obituary was buried somewhere in the Murray Ledger and Tribune collection. What I found ended up being way more useful than I expected, so I kept going down that rabbit hole. The Murray Ledger publishes out of Murray County, Minnesota — mainly Claremont and Slayton. The obituaries go back decades, and they are not all digitized in one neat package. That is the first thing you need to understand before you start searching.

Unveiling The Treasures Of Murray Ledger Obituaries A Window To The Past

The actual obituary text in these papers tends to be shorter than what you see today. A typical entry from the 1950s might be two or three paragraphs. They list the deceased, surviving family members, the funeral home, and sometimes a sentence about where they worked or which church they attended. That is it. But those details are exactly what make them useful for genealogy. Here is how I actually went about finding what I needed: First, I checked the Minnesota Historical Society library catalog. They have microfilm of the Murray Ledger going back to the early 1900s. You can request a scan through their interlibrary loan system, or if you live anywhere in Minnesota you can walk in and use the reader-printer on-site. A single microfilm reel covers about three months of the paper, and you can search by date if you have an approximate timeframe.

Second, I tried the website of the current publisher. The Murray Ledger still runs obituaries online, but their archive only goes back about five or six years. Anything older requires a separate request. I called the newsroom and asked about their archive policy. They pointed me toward the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, which is a free repository. That third option is probably the easiest path for most people. The Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub is a collaboration between the state library and several newspaper publishers. It uses OCR text, which means you can search by name directly. The catch is that OCR quality varies a lot depending on the condition of the original paper. I found maybe 60 percent of the names I searched for accurately. The rest required browsing page-by-page through the relevant month. Here is an example from my own search. I was looking for an obituary dated somewhere around March 1967. The name came back clean in the search — the OCR had captured it perfectly. The full text listed her husband, three children, and the fact that she had taught school in Tracy County for twenty-two years. That last detail was something no family member had mentioned, and it gave me a completely new angle for the research.

The trick with these older obituaries is learning what they do not tell you. They rarely list the exact birth date, and they almost never include the parents' names unless the person was very young when they died. So you end up using the obituary as a bridge, not a destination. You get the surviving children's names, then go look for their records elsewhere. I also ran into a problem that took me a while to work around. Several obituaries from the 1940s and 1950s were filed under the husband's name even when the deceased was the wife. In one case I was searching for "Mary Elizabeth" something and could not find her. I switched to searching for her husband's full name plus the word "dies" or "died," and the obituary appeared under his listing. This convention was common in rural papers at the time, and it applies to the Murray Ledger just as much as anywhere else. Another thing to keep in mind: the funeral home information is usually consistent across a given time period. If you are looking at obituaries from the 1970s, most of them go through either Grotting Funeral Home in Slayton or Olson's in Claremont. That consistency can help you confirm you are looking at the right era of the paper, since funeral home names change over the decades.

If you want to access the material digitally, here are the actual paths I used: The Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub is at mdnh.lib.mn.us. You can browse by publisher and select Murray Ledger. The dates covered start around 1900 and go up to the present, though the overlap between their online archive and the microfilm holdings is not perfectly clean. Some months exist in one place and not the other. For the physical microfilm, the Minnesota Historical Society holds the primary collection. There is also a copy at the Southwest Regional Library in Worthington, about thirty minutes from the Murray County area. If you are local, that is the faster option.

There is one more resource that people often miss. The Slayton Public Library has a local history room with clippings files organized alphabetically by last name. These are photocopies of obituaries that someone pulled out of the paper and filed by hand. The collection is incomplete, but the entries that are there go back to the 1930s and are already transcribed, which saves you from reading faded microfilm text. The biggest limitation of all of this is that the Murray Ledger obituaries are not fully OCR'd for the earliest years. Issues before about 1975 often have poor character recognition, and some pages are too damaged for the software to read reliably. If your ancestor died before 1975, budget extra time for manual browsing. Expect to spend twenty to forty minutes scanning through a month's worth of pages to find a single obituary, depending on how common the last name is in the area. Also, the papers did not publish an obituary for every person who died in the county. Some families simply did not place one, or they placed it in a different paper. If you are stuck, try the Worthington Daily News or the Tracy County Advance as supplementary sources for the same time period.

I ended up finding three obituaries in the Murray Ledger that filled gaps in my family tree, and each one had at least one detail that was not in any other record I had found. That is the thing about local newspaper obituaries — they are incomplete by design, but the fragments they do contain are often uniquely useful because nobody else copied them before you.