Using Westmoreland County Obituaries as Historical Research
The Tribune-Review has been publishing obituaries for Westmoreland County residents for decades. If you are trying to trace family history or understand what a neighborhood used to look like, the obituary archives are one of the most underused resources available. They are also frustrating to navigate if you do not know how the system works. Here is how to get through it without wasting a weekend. The online archive at triblive.com covers obituaries going back several years with full search functionality. For anything older than roughly 2015, you need to go through the microfilm collection at the Westmoreland County Public Library in Youngwood or the genealogy room at the Hamilton Hotel location. I spent an afternoon there last year looking up a great-uncle who died in 2003, and the digital search tool had the listing but no image. The microfilm reader gave me the actual clipping, which included a different funeral home listing than what was printed online. That detail alone let me track down the burial record at Saint Patrick Cemetery in Morristown. The search interface on the Tribune-Review site lets you filter by name, date range, and sometimes by funeral home. The date range filter is the most useful feature because obituary names alone are not distinctive enough in a county of roughly 350,000 people. Searching "Robert Miller" without a date range will return hundreds of results across multiple decades. Narrowing to a five-year window usually gets you to the right person within a minute.
When you find a match, the digital version typically includes the biographical sketch, surviving family members, service details, and the funeral home that handled arrangements. The funeral home information is valuable because those offices often retain physical copies of older obituaries that were never digitized, especially from the 1990s and early 2000s. I called a funeral home in Latrobe once that had paper files going back to 1987. They photocopied an obituary for me that was not available anywhere online, and it had the name of a sibling I did not know existed. For deeper research, the library microfilm is where things get complicated. The microfilm is organized by publication date, not by name. You have to know roughly when the person died, load the correct reel, and scan through days of listings until you find the right clipping. A typical week of the Tribune-Review contains eight to twelve obituaries. Each reel covers about four to six weeks of publication. If your date estimate is off by a month, you are looking at an extra hour of film time. There is a workaround that most people miss. The library maintains an index card file for obituaries going back to the late 1980s. The cards are alphabetical by the deceased person's last name, then first name, with the date of death and microfilm reel number listed next to each entry. This index saves you from guessing dates. I found my great-aunt's obituary in about ten minutes using the index instead of the several hours it would have taken to scan reels blindly. The index is located in the genealogy reference section, not at the circulation desk, so ask a librarian where it is before you start looking around on your own.
One thing the online archive does not handle well is variant spellings. If a family member's name was recorded differently on the obituary than on a birth certificate or marriage license, the search will not connect the two. I encountered this when researching a line where the census records showed "Kowalski" but the obituary used "Cowski." The library index did not solve this either because it follows the exact spelling on the published clipping. The only fix is to search phonetically or to look through all K-sound surnames in the relevant date range. It is tedious but it works. Another limitation is that some obituaries from the mid-2000s are missing from the digital archive entirely. The Tribune-Review began digitizing their archive around 2013, and there are gaps in the transition period. If someone died between 2005 and 2012 and you cannot find their obituary online, the microfilm is your only option. Do not assume the person was not published. Just assume the digitization missed it. If you are doing serious genealogy work, I would recommend taking photos of every clipping you find rather than relying on the library's scanner. The scanner produces images that are too low resolution to read small print, especially for older clippings where the ink has faded. A decent phone camera in good lighting will give you something you can actually use later. Bring a small LED light if you are reading microfilm near closing time, because the reader lamps get dim after a while and you will miss details.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries themselves are not just death notices. The biographical sections often include military service records, union memberships, church affiliations, immigration details, and names of parents or siblings that do not appear in other public records. A single obituary from the 1970s might list three siblings who moved to different states, giving you leads that would take weeks to uncover through census records alone. Pay attention to the surviving family list. Those names are frequently the key to unlocking the next generation of research. For anyone starting out, I suggest beginning with the online archive for recent deaths to learn the format and structure, then moving to the library for anything older. The online system is faster but shallower. The library materials are slower but deeper. Combining both approaches usually cuts a two-week research project down to about three days, assuming you have the approximate dates and the person actually died in Westmoreland County during the paper's publication span.
