How to Find and Use Westmoreland County Obituary Records
Most people looking for Westmoreland County obituaries end up hitting the same dead ends. You search Facebook, you hit paywalls on Ancestry, and the county government website sends you in circles. Here is how it actually works if you want to do it without wasting a weekend. The core of this is understanding where records live and how they are organized. The Westmoreland County Courthouse in Greensburg holds probate and death records, but accessing them requires a visit or a formal request through their records division. The county doesn't digitize everything, which is a problem if you need something quickly. For recent obituaries—anything within the last twenty years or so—the best sources are local newspaper archives. The Westmoreland Eagle has been publishing obituaries for decades, and their online archive goes back to around 1997. Before that, you are looking at microfilm or physical copies at the Westmoreland County Historical Society on South George Street. I spent about three hours last year tracking down a great-aunt's obituary from 1963. The Historical Society told me the index didn't go that far back, so I ended up going through the Westmoreland Eagle physical files on microfilm at the library. The librarian pointed me to the right machine, and it took maybe fifteen minutes once I knew where to look. That's the thing nobody tells you—you need to know where the index ends and the raw archives begin. The Historical Society's online catalog says "full text available" for many items, but a lot of those are just finding aids, not the actual obituaries. You have to go in person or hire someone local to pull them.
The Practical Process
Start with the funeral home. Most families choose a funeral home in the county, and those homes publish obituaries directly. Companies like Neff Funeral Home in Latrobe or Weaver Funeral Home in Mt. Pleasant maintain their own online obituary sections. These tend to be more complete than newspaper versions because families often submit them directly. The newspaper edits, shortens, and sometimes reprints only a portion. If you want the full text, check the funeral home first. For older records, the Westmoreland County Genealogical Society maintains several databases that are more useful than the county's own search tools. Their transcription volunteers have done work on death indexes from the 1800s and early 1900s. You can access some of this through their website with a membership, or you can use it free at partner libraries like the Armstrong County Library system, which sometimes carries their transcriptions. It isn't perfect—there are indexing errors, misspelled names, and gaps in years where records were lost to fire or water damage—but it covers ground the official county database doesn't touch at all. Here is a detail people miss: the Westmoreland County Register of Wills office holds wills and estate files, and those often include obituary references or newspaper clippings that aren't indexed anywhere else. If you are doing serious genealogy work on a family line in this county, pulling the estate file from the Register of Wills will usually give you more information than any obituary search. The file itself might not contain the obituary, but the probate process generates documents that reference where it was published and when. I found a 1921 obituary this way that wasn't in the Eagle's archive because that particular issue was misfiled or damaged. The probate docket had the publication date, the funeral home name, and a note about the newspaper. From there, I traced it down.
What Doesn't Work
Don't rely on general genealogy sites as your primary source. Ancestry and FamilySearch have Westmoreland County material, but the coverage is spotty and heavily dependent on volunteer contributions. You will find gaps, duplicates, and incorrect attributions. One common problem is that surnames get matched to the wrong family line because Westmoreland County had a lot of name repetition across generations. The Miller who died in 1887 in Mount Vernon is not the same Miller as the one who died in 1893 in Youngstown, even if the first names match. The county didn't require middle names on death certificates until much later, so you are working with incomplete data. The other thing that fails is assuming every obituary was preserved. The 1972 flood affected portions of the county, and records from affected townships are harder to track down. Some local newspapers folded or merged, and their archives were scattered. If an obituary appeared in a paper that no longer exists, you might only find it through a funeral home's records or a family's personal copy.
Get the Full Details
Quick Reference
The Westmoreland County Historical Society is at 325 South George Street in Greensburg. Call ahead before visiting microfilm collections. The Westmoreland County Register of Wills is at the Courthouse, 1 Courthouse Square, also in Greensburg. They handle probate records but require identification and a legitimate research purpose. The Westmoreland Eagle archives are partially online but go back only to 1997. For anything earlier, you need the Historical Society or a local library with microfilm access. The Armstrong County Library in Kittanning has a solid microfilm collection that includes Westmoreland County material.
