Lake County Ohio GenWeb News-Herald Obituary Index 1980-2005

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The indexing of the News-Herald began in 1980 by Barbara Ferris at Willoughby Public Library. It was alphabetized and hand written in a little book, at first in two year increments, and later year by year. Its second decade was begun by Susan Clark. Subsequently several other library personnel have helped with this project. Beginning in 1997 these were done on computer, alphabetized and printed every six months for annual books. All of these books are located at the library in the reference section.

The basic information gathered for the index varied from year to year. Most, but not all years included the age, if given. Some years the age may have been calculated from a birth date, but this is not clear.

Maiden names are generally in parentheses ( ) but this is not always the case. Other married names were sometimes put in parentheses, sometimes not. Names of men who changed their names were treated like maiden names, although some may be listed with the current name in the parentheses. Maiden names were included in the index for some years, and not in others. Some years included the maiden name only if it was in the title line. Others were taken from the first paragraph. In many cases, even if it is not stated, a maiden name can be found in, or derived from, the actual obituary.

Nicknames were put in quote marks " " if possible, although some were likely missed.

Between 1980 and 1985, the library recorded the death date, rather than the publication date; we have indicated this by means of an asterisk before the date: *Jan. 3. Obituaries are sometime after the death date. When there was no death date given in the obituary during this time period, we have used the publication date (without an asterisk) instead: Jan. 4. Beyond 1985 the date(s) of publication are generally used. In this case, it might be wise to look at the papers before and after the date given to ascertain if there were multiple publications. Generally if there were two or three publishing dates, the same information is given. A few will have updated or corrected information on a subsequent date(s). If the dates have a wide spread, the first is often the death notice, and the second a notice of the service arrangements.

In 1986 when the Painesville Telegraph was bought out by the News-Herald and subsequently closed, the members of Lake County Genealogical Society switched to indexing the News-Herald for Morley Library. Although this seems to be a duplication of the Society's effort, there are some differences. First, the Morley index only indexed the News-Herald since 1986. Secondly, they only indexed those individuals from, or with connections to, Lake County. Third, they included more information in their index. Fourth, a second opinion on transcriptions is usually a good idea. Errors happened in both indexings. Morley Library index is on their site at www.morleylibrary.org under Genealogy.

The on-line version of the newspaper did not publish all the obituaries on any one day. No attempt was made to index this on-line version, although there may have been some obituaries there which were not in the print version.

The special locality editions of the paper were probably not indexed with the exception of 2000 where it is specifically noted as being "Ash". For the most part, only the Ashtabula edition appears to have additional obituaries.

Presentation of the information here is in decade increments to ease the searching for those with unknown death dates. It was not done as a single index for the sheer size of the files, and to allow this to be posted while the project was underway. The indexing by the library stopped after 2006 with no plans to continue.

Copies of the original obituary may be obtained from Willoughby Public Library, as they have the complete run of News-Herald on microfilm.

Proofreading of this data was not usually done with the original newspapers. However, when names did not seem right or information was not included, they were checked with other sources. These sources include Morley Library's obituary index online, Morley card index, Lake County Genealogical Society cemetery transcriptions, Cleveland News Index, Ohio Death certificate index, and, on occasion, the actual newspaper on microfilm.

Thanks go to Willoughby Public Library staff for their assistance with this project. Also a big thank you to Herb Turk who manipulated the files to make what you see, from the root text that was typed by his wife, Cynthia and in later years, the librarians at Willoughby Library.

Year 2006 was added separately:

A-B	2006	2007	2008
C-E	2006	2007	2008
F-I	2006	2007	2008
J-L	2006	2007	2008
M-N	2006	2007	2008
O-R	2006	2007	2008
S	2006	2007	2008
T-Z	2006	2007	2008

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Last updated 22 July 2011	© 2006-11 Lake County, Ohio GenWeb