Southwestern Indiana Online Obituaries

Image by Amy Johnson Crow
on her Flikr account

Who doesn’t love a free digital database? I know when I find one that I can use, I am over the moon. Over the holidays, I spent hours on a particular one literally combing the pages for information. If you have any recent family from southwestern Indiana, you may be interested in this database too.

The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is not an uncommon research stop for any genealogist. If you have never been there, it should be on your must-visit list. 

One feature of the website is a section of free databases. You do not need membership or library access to see these databases, which is the case for some of the other functions on the site. This is a great place to do some pre-research for a visit and also to do standalone research. For those with Indiana ancestry, click the Indiana Resources link. This section covers general research topics in addition to digital databases by county. Which brings me to the database I fell in love with.

But first, a back story. In 2013 the annual FGS conference was in Fort Wayne. I was so excited to attend and made a couple week trip out of it. It was a great time, and you can read about it here, here, and here.

I was at the library information desk at the Genealogy Center when a cart of very large albums rolled by. Albums which contained every obituary from the Washington, Indiana local newspaper beginning in 1984. My ears piqued up. Portions of my family still lived there. The albums were sent out for digitization, and I periodically checked back to see when they would be available online. Time passed. I finally had the time to look and find people again!

The title for these amazing records is Obituaries and Funerals, 1984-2018, Daviess County, Indiana. According to the website of this database:

 Obituaries and funerals from The Washington Times Herald, Washington, Daviess County, Indiana. This collection contains many obituaries from Daviess, Martin, Pike and Knox Counties in Indiana. These records were compiled by Kay Hedrick and generously shared with The Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library and interested genealogists everywhere. 

Thanks to her, there is a wealth of information for researchers interested in these counties. For myself, I found 87 obituaries and funeral notices for relatives, and I am not done. Both of my grandmothers were there, their siblings, my grandfather’s siblings, and more cousins than you could shake a stick at. If I start on distant lines, it could get scary. 

The one downside? It is image access only with no keyword search. There is an index for each year you can browse through to determine which page number(s) to look at but no ability to type a surname and find it. The index generally only has the deceased person’s information, but a few of the indexes include parent’s surnames. With that information in mind, just remember you will need to set aside plenty of time to page through the images.

There is not a “save” button on the images, but there is a “printer-friendly view.” With this view, it is possible to print or save the page image. From there, you can edit the size down as needed with your image editing program of your choice.

So, off you go! Don’t forget to tell me if this was useful and if you found anything good.