Working With Wheeling Wv Obituaries How The Intelligencer And News Register Preserves Community Memory
If you are pulling obituaries from The Intelligencer or the News Register, the first thing you need to know is that they are not stored in a single searchable database. They live across two different publication sites with different paywalls, different archive depths, and different formats. The Intelligencer (WTOV9's obituary section) tends to publish full-length pieces with photos and detailed life histories. The News Register runs similar content but with more condensed notices and a longer historical run going back further in some cases. I spent probably six months last year compiling obituaries from both papers for a genealogy project involving families that lived in the Ohio County area between 1995 and 2015. The main headache I ran into was that neither site has a clean export function. You cannot bulk-download or even easily search by date range beyond the current month on most of their public pages. The Intelligencer's archive sits behind a subscription wall, and the free tier only shows you a few days back. The News Register is slightly better for older content but their search interface is built on an old platform that breaks if you try to go past three years without clearing your cookies or using incognito mode. My workaround was straightforward. I set up a daily check of both sites at 6 AM using a simple script that scraped the headline URLs and saved them as plain text. When I needed the full article, I pulled it through a cached version on the Wayback Machine if it was older than the paywall window, or I ordered a physical copy of the print edition through the newspaper's microfilm request service. That cost me about $3 per request and took three to five business days. Not ideal, but it beat paying $8 a month for a digital archive pass on each paper.
There are a few things most people miss when working with these two outlets. First, the obituary content is often submitted by funeral homes, which means the text in the Intelligencer and the News Register for the same person can differ. I found this out when my grandmother's cousin died and one paper listed her as surviving by her daughter and son-in-law, while the other added a third granddaughter the funeral home had forgotten to mention. Always cross-reference both papers and call the funeral home directly if you need the complete survivor list. Second, the date of publication does not always match the date of death. In West Virginia, there is a lag of one to four days between death and print publication, sometimes longer if the family needs time to gather information. If you are tracking an ancestor who died on a specific date, check the obituary that runs two to five days after that date, not the day of. Both papers also run "death notices" that are shorter and cheaper to place, which sometimes get mixed in with full obituaries in search results. A death notice will have basic facts—name, age, date of death, funeral home, surviving family—but no biography or photo. A full obituary is usually at least two paragraphs and includes life details, career, hobbies, and a longer survivor list. If you are doing serious research, filter out the death notices early. They do not contain useful genealogical data beyond names and dates. The News Register has an older archive that goes back to the late 1990s in digitized form, but the images are low-resolution and the OCR text is unreliable. I learned this the hard way when I tried to search for a surname and got hits for completely unrelated articles because the text recognition confused "Harris" with "Harries" and missed about forty percent of the actual matches. Reading the actual image files is slower but far more accurate. Plan for about twenty minutes per article if you are working through scanned PDFs from the mid-2000s era.
Neither paper indexes obituaries by location within Wheeling, so if you are trying to narrow results to a specific neighborhood or church congregation, you have to read through the text manually. The Intelligencer occasionally includes the funeral service location, which can be a clue, but many entries skip that detail entirely. If you know the funeral home, you can sometimes call them and ask if they submitted the notice, which saves you from digging through weeks of archives. For anyone just starting out with these papers, I would suggest grabbing a free trial of the Intelligencer's digital archive and spending the first week just browsing without a specific goal. You will quickly get a sense of the format variations, which families tend to write longer pieces, and which years have the most complete coverage. The paper's staff seems to have cut back on obituary editing around 2018, which means articles from that period onward are longer but less fact-checked. Typos in names and dates became more common. I caught at least three errors in obituaries I was relying on and had to correct them using cemetery records or birth certificates before they were usable. If you need the content quickly and do not mind paying, the cheapest route is probably the News Register's online subscription, which runs about $4 a month and gives you access to about ten years of digitized obituaries. For content older than that, the West Virginia State Archives in Charleston holds microfilm of both papers, and they allow on-site viewing. It is not convenient, but it is free and it covers gaps that neither newspaper's website currently fills.
Get the Full Details
The real value in these obituaries is not just the names and dates but the local context. People in Wheeling tended to list their employer, their church, their veteran status, and the clubs they belonged to. That information does not show up in Social Security death indexes or cemetery databases. A single Intelligencer obituary from 2003 might mention that the deceased worked at Wheeling Steel for thirty-two years and was a member of St. Joseph Catholic Church. That is two data points that would otherwise require separate searches. Treat each obituary as a small biographical sketch rather than a death announcement, and you will pull more useful information from every one you read.
