Indiana Newspaper Obituaries (1848 - Current)

Effective Strategies for Archive Exploration

1. Initiating Your Search: Start your family genealogy journey by searching by any known names, which can help put you on the right path and narrow down the right geographical areas to search.
2. Refining Your Inquiry:
   • Step 1: Specify your ancestor's full name, so you will get highly accurate results that contain real exact matches, and even the close ones.
   • Step 2: Target the local events, and limit the scope of the search with additional keywords indicating a home town or an educational institution.
   • Step 3: Eliminate unwanted results by identifying words/terms to exclude - e.g. States or Towns that you know aren’t relevant.
   • Step 4: Reduce your research to a particular era by specifying a specified year range to hone in on the period you want to explore.
   • Step 5: Order your findings chronologically or by importance to match your research ambitions and goals.
3. Navigating Common Obstacles: A lot of common last names, often spelled in different ways, mean that researchers need to use creative ways to search, like using initials or maiden names, to find the right people.
4. Verifying Your Discoveries: Your search does not end with discovery; it is more than just documenting people’s names and their deaths, but it should also aim to verify the accuracy of the data wherever possible. So corroborating with multiple records and sources is the only sure-fire way of ensuring all discoveries are what they seem.

Tips for Searching Indiana Obituary Archives

If your relative had a commonly used name, it could be difficult to find the result you want. The challenge of discovering your ancestry is building a family tree that’s relevant to you.

It’s not uncommon to choose the wrong relative with a similar name. So, how do you find those elusive ancestors by searching the Indiana obituary archives?

The majority of old obituaries include some basic family information. This information can fill in the gaps in your knowledge and enable you to fact-check those old obituaries later.

Our top tips for searching Indiana obituary archives online include:

• Use the information from more recent ancestors to find the correct obituary.
• Search by initials. Older obituaries often mentioned the deceased by their initials.
• Search for husband names when looking for a wife.
• Search by date range and first/last name only to find Indiana obituaries that may have been misheard or misspelled.

Using these techniques can help you to uncover ancestors that are difficult to find.