Have you ever gone looking for an obituary in a newspaper to get additional information on a person’s life and family only to find it locked behind a paywall?
While many newspapers are available for free on various archival sites like Internet Archive, Chronicling America, and Small Town Papers, some newspapers are only available with a paid subscription, also known as a paywall.
The most frequently used and well known paid newspaper archival site is Newspapers.com. While they are under the Ancestry corporate umbrella, they do require a separate subscription.
I certainly understand how frustrating this roadblock can be during the research process. Especially when you are able to see a preview of the obituary and know it has something you are looking for.
Recently, this was the exact situation I found myself in.
So today, I want to share with you my research path for locating and obtaining these obituaries for free.
Most of the time.
This is not guaranteed to work, and it will vary from situation to situation, but below I have outlined a rather detailed account, using a real-life situation I encountered, of my typical research path to obtain these obituaries for free.
Backstory:
While on a recent family vacation to South Dakota, we stopped in at the Nemo Cemetery so I could take pictures and wander around. The grave covering for one individual, Tracey Schmitz, caught my eye as it had a beautiful poem inscribed on the top of it.
I noticed that her father was buried next to her and photographed both. I was able to upload pictures of their headstones to FindAGrave.
Recently, I’ve also been doing some cemetery categorization work over at WikiTree and decided to add the cemetery to the site for practice. I also wanted to add their profiles to the site to help see how it all fits together, so I went in search of information to aid in building a short biography for these individuals.
Research Path:
Once I am ready to research, I begin with what I know. I have a name, Tracey D Schmitz, and dates of birth and death: October 26, 1956 – June 09, 1984. I also knew she was buried in Nemo Cemetery in Nemo, South Dakota.
First, I do a cursory internet search on Google just to see what is available. Sometimes you get lucky and can easily find an obituary. However, being that this person passed away several decades ago, the likelihood of finding it online so easily was slim.
With no results after quickly scanning the first handful of internet search results, I then move on to more specialized sites I can search for free: FindAGrave, FamilySearch, and Ancestry.
Looking at her Find A Grave, there is a reference to the obituary, “from the Index to Obits in the Rapid City Journal, obit is in the June 11 paper, no place of death given,” but no further information.
From here, I went to browse the index at Chronicling America to see if they have an archive of Rapid City Journal available online. They do not.
Next, I went to Ancestry to see if a user might have uploaded a copy of the obituary. On Ancestry, you are usually able to search for free, with some information in the results removed, but are rarely ever able to view a search result without having an active paid subscription to Ancestry. To get around this, I am able to access Ancestry for free from my library card. Many libraries offer free Ancestry access. I am not able to save anything to my personal tree, but I can still download images of census records or family photos and I can view other family trees.
In the Ancestry search, I found a link to the Rapid City Genealogy Society that does look-ups in the Rapid City Journal, and even had the obituary I needed, but asks or a donation in return. I’m not opposed to this, I’m just on a budget and a few dollars here and there will quickly add up in the long run.
So far I've exhausted several of my go-to resources and I know I will not be able to obtain this obituary without forking over money. At this point, I will turn to others for community help. There are a few places I do this at:
- Facebook Groups
- WikiTree Forums
- Reddit (specifically the sub-Reddit r/Genealogy).
r/Genealogy will post a weekly Paid Record Look Up Requests Thread on Sundays where users can ask other users to lookup something from a paywall site. However, because I was doing this research on a Thursday, there was a greater likelihood of my request not being fulfilled due to lack of activity in the thread.
I decide Facebook Groups will probably be my best bet for this step and head over to ask in a couple different groups. The first I ask in is the Free Obituary Look-Ups group. They are organized by state and are usually fairly responsive, but require you to know exactly what you are looking for before you ask. The second group I go to for assistance is South Dakota Genealogy Network. Here I ask if someone with a paid account can do a lookup for me and also post the information.
Now I wait.
This may take a few days sometimes, but it usually gets done sooner rather than later. Today I was lucky and my request was answered within ten minutes of posting to the Facebook group.
This research took me about 45 minutes to complete, including interruptions from a toddler. The great thing that I love about this research path is that it showcases so many different resources.
Genealogy is filled with so many great resources but finding and utilizing them is another challenge all itself. My top three tips for keeping resources organized are:
- Start by Organizing
- Keep Research Records
- Use Bookmarks
I'll cover these tips more in depth at a later date and give examples of how I do each step.
What are your favorite research resources?
How many resources do you use while researching?
It may seem like just a couple were used after you've completed the research, but when you look back at your research path it is often far greater than expected. This research outlined above, for instance, may have used Facebook to ask someone to use their Newspapers account, we still accessed Google, FindAGrave, Newspapers, Chronicling America, Ancestry, the Rapid City Genealogy Society, Reddit, and Facebook.
To help with organizing resources, I’ve created a page here to list these resource sites that I find, both big and small, and organized them roughly by state.
I created this resource because I had a huge bookmark folder of research resources that I wanted to easily share with others. Go check it out and let me know what I’m missing!
- Patricia
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