Legacy's ObitMessenger email alerts aren't completely reliable

Below on the left you see an obituary that appeared in the August 11, 2017 St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Legacy has an ObitMessenger service that is supposed to send you alerts if certain keywords show up in a specified newspaper's obituaries. You can specify up to five keywords per alert, and you can set up multiple alerts. Perfect for keeping track of obituaries with surnames of interest.

On the right is an email I received on August 12th, 2017 stating that no obituaries had appeared in the past 14 days with the specified words. (The alert is localized to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.) I have deleted the surnames from the email image that aren't applicable. I've also deleted my email address.

I don't know why the obituary wasn't found.

A search today on the website returns the obituary.
I may have to stop relying on the email service.

Caution is needed with obituaries

Obituaries can be great resources for filling in both recent and past generations of branches of your family tree, but one has to be very careful about the assumptions one makes when reading them.

[All names below have been altered.]

I read the below obituary of a distant cousin

SCHWINN, ROBIN (nee Goldstein) … dear mother of Penny Ann (Edward) Molloy, Ethan J. (Marcia) Johnson and the late Alice First; dear grandmother of Lana (Louis) Spalding, George W., Jack C., Rachel A. Johnson and Melissa Steinway; dear great grandmother of Matthew and Michael Spalding...

From this obituary I entered three children for Robin Goldstein and __ Schwinn

• Penny Ann Schwinn – (married Edward Molloy)
• Marcia Schwinn – (married Ethan J. Johnson) (daughter Rachel)
• Alice Schwinn – (married ___ First)

I was unable to assign the other grandchildren to their parents without further information. I suspect there are a number of genealogists who would fill in the blanks as I did, carefully noting where they got the information, naturally.

Then I found Alice Schwinn’s obit

...Mrs. Schwinn…She is survived by her father, Ethan Johnson; mother, Robin Schwinn; sister, Penny Molloy; brother, John Johnson; grandmother, Opal Johnson; and close friend, Patricia Marie.

I knew something was wrong somewhere. There was no way Alice's father was her sister’s husband. And here was a brother not mentioned in the first obituary.

After a little thought I redrew the tree.

Robin Goldstein (Spouse 1: Ethan John Johnson) (Spouse 2: ___ Schwinn)
Children:

• Penny Ann ___ (married Edward Molloy)
• Ethan John Johnson, Jr. (married Marcia ___) (daughter Rachel)
• Alice Johnson (married ___ First)

This information fits both obituaries, but contains some new assumptions. In order to confirm these, I could make a trip to the library and look up some marriage records in the microfilm. Or I could try to contact the cousins.

It is common for individuals to be better known by their middle name than their first, especially when they share a name with a parent. It is also common for half-siblings and step parents to be referenced without the modifiers. This leads to ambiguity that sometimes doesn't appear ambiguous.

Amanuensis Monday: Obituary for Louis Pleas Gober

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, newspaper articles, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them.

I began this project back on February 16, 2009.  Since I began, many others have joined in on the meme. I am thrilled that this meme I started has inspired so many to transcribe their family history documents. Why do we transcribe? I provide my three reasons in the linked post. You may find others.

***

This week I am sharing the obituary for my wife's 2nd great grandfather, Louis Pleas Gober. It appeared in the November 4, 1948 Sikeston Herald, and I retrieved the image from Ancestry.com.

Legacy's ObitMessenger Service now *Free*

I just received an email from Legacy.com.  (The date in the first paragraph says 11/16, but I received the email today, 11/18)

Dear ObitMessenger Subscriber,


We are very pleased to announce that on 11/16/2010 we will launch an upgraded version of our ObitMessenger^TM service. One of the biggest changes: ObitMessenger^TM will be free with no sign-up or annual fees. Here are some of the other exciting upgrades:


* Select up to five keywords and we'll search both the deceased's name and the obituary text.
* Search as many or as few newspapers as you like, and update your newspaper list at any time.
* To streamline your results e-mail, we will now include four lines of text per obituary with a link to access the full obituary.
* You will now be able to choose a secret question for account security. As a current subscriber, your secret question will default to your mother's maiden name. You will have the option to leave as-is or select a new question.


Your current account information (including login, password, keywords and newspapers) will be carried over to the upgraded ObitMessenger^TM service. In other words, no action is necessary on your part.


You can visit your account here.


If you have any questions, please contact us at obitmessenger@legacy.com.


Thank you,
Legacy.com

Legacy handles the obituaries for hundreds of newspapers across the US and Canada, so this is a great way to retrieve obituaries mentioning a particular surname regardless of what newspaper they happen to appear in.

Previously, you could search for five surnames in every newspaper they managed, but it would only find an obituary if it was the surname of the deceased -- not if the surname appeared in the text as a relative, etc.  And this cost $40/year.

You could also search for five keywords/phrases in one newspaper.  It wouldn't matter where the words appeared in the text of the obituary.  This cost $15/year.  (And they prohibited words such as "funeral" or "flowers" preventing it from being used as a means to get every obituary from a single newspaper emailed to you.)

The local newspaper stopped updating their RSS feed about a year ago, and I'm not pleased with the online interface, so I've been fiddling around with the $15/year option for a little over a month trying to find the perfect combination of keywords to get the most local obituaries sent to me via email.  I was more than happy to pay the $15 if I was comfortable I was receiving most of the obituaries that were important to me. The maximum I've achieved is somewhere between 25-40% of the total, depending upon the day. I was satisified with the results.  (I was using the names of three funeral homes, the word 'mortuary', and the word fragment 'cremat'.)

Since each 'account' is tied to an email address only, I have several email addresses, and the Terms of Service don't appear to prohibit setting up multiple accounts, it shouldn't be difficult to now set up a few different accounts with the names of all the major funeral homes in the area, and in this fashion get close to all of the obituaries emailed to me.

I've also set up an account that searches for five of my more uncommon surnames across their network. 

My only complaint?

I paid $15 a little over a month ago for a full year account.  And now it's free.


One other note: I do not use my mother's maiden name as a security passcode anywhere.  I maintain a genealogy blog where anyone who wanted to could look it up. I'm not silly.

UPDATE : The emails now contain adverts for flowers and genealogy services.  I see nothing wrong with this.  I am more than happy to see these daily adverts in place of an annual fee.

Update 2: Legacy added a comment, and as they state, and I hadn't noticed, it is possible to create multiple searches on one email address, so multiple email addresses are no longer necessary. 

Follow Friday: Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records

This week, for Follow Friday, I'd like to recommend another indexing project similar to the two I mentioned last week, though this one was started in 2003.

Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records

Webmaster, Joe Beine, has catalogued online resources for death certificates, registers, funeral notices, obituaries, probate indexes, and burial records.  The website is limited to the United States, but there are listings for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  He has also created separate pages for seven cities (Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Louis.)

You can follow when the site is updated by subscribing to the RSS feeds at Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog, or his Twitter account.

Amanuensis Monday: Obituaries

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

This week I am transcribing the obituaries of three great grandparents - Herman and Anna Feinstein, and Barney Newmark.

Carnival of Genealogy #81: Writing a Blog Obituary

poster by the footnoteMaven

The assignment for the 81st Carnival of Genealogy: "If your blog ended or was lost/deleted today, how would you write its obituary?"

TransylvanianDutch, the genealogy blog written by Missourian, John Newmark, was lost today. The blog had its origins in April of 2007 on another blog by the same name, and maintained by the same author. A friend of Mr. Newmark's introduced him to an online genealogy site, which turned out to be a 'gateway drug' for this resident of the 'Gateway City'.

Mr. Newmark had been blogging since 2002, so when he moved his genealogy writing to its own space on Blogspot he transferred a few older posts on the topic, but the true origin of the blog has to be identified as April of 2007.

TransylvanianDutch (sometimes referred to affectionately as TransDutch) had received some recognition, being listed in the Top 25 Most Popular Genealogy Blogs in April of 2009 by ProGenealogists, as well as being added to AllTop's list of Top Genealogy sites in August of 2008.

At the funeral, several fellow geneablogs talked about what they would miss about TransDutch. Some said they would miss the weekly Amanuensis Monday posts. Others said they were always impressed by the high quality of English.

The Coroner's Report is uncertain about cause of death. There are rumors that a programmer in Mountain View, California spilled a glass of orange juice on the servers and the bits and bytes containing two years worth of data were lost in a second. Author, John Newmark, hadn't backed up the posts. Ashamed, he returned to his former blog, and says he will return to blogging about politics, religion and the other stuff he was writing about before his genealogy obsession. Fans of his genealogy posts tried to talk some sense into him -- comparing the five people who used to read his blog to the current numbers. But he refused to listen.

Contributions should be sent to the Dead Blog Fund.

Creative Note: When I was in high school, one summer I attended a 'Creative Writing Camp' in Michigan. We were given a similar assignment and had to write an obituary for ourselves. I entitled my obituary: "Death by Orange Juice." I had recently learned that one can drown from having one's beverage go 'down the wrong tube.' So I decided I had to give my blog a similar cause of death.

And yes, this is just a creative exercise; this blog isn't dead. And I do back up my posts.

But I have been thinking about occasionally (maybe once a week) writing down some of my non-genealogical thoughts here. Stuff in addition to the social networking posts I've written lately.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries - and other area newspapers

CURRENT INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND HERE


One of the problems with the blog-format is that one finds oneself rewriting old posts with updated information. The old posts remain with the outdated, sometimes inaccurate information.

For example, I have written several times about researching obituaries in St. Louis, particularly for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I'm going to do it again, and I'm now going to add a link at the top of all my old posts to this entry, so that anyone who finds those old pages doesn't leave the site with outdated information.

And if I write another post in the future, I will add a link at the top of this entry, and update the links in the prior entries.

The St. Louis Public Library Obituary Search

The St. Louis Public Library has created a searchable index for St. Louis Post Dispatch obituaries covering the years: 1880-1930, 1942-1945, 1960-1964, and 1992-2008. (I suspect they will continue to update the index as time goes by.)

Two examples:

1) A great-grandfather's entry:

Feinstein, Herman M. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1963 11/8 p1B, Article 11/9 p5A

His classified obituary appeared on November 8th, 1963 on page 1B. An article appeared on November 9th, on page 5A.

2) The entry for one of Herman's brothers, who died as an infant

Feinstein, David St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1896 Burial permit 3/18

The burial permit appeared March 18th, 1896. The page number isn't indexed in this case, but we still have the date of the newspaper. The burial permit listings contained significantly less information than an obituary. Usually just a name, date and address. I know that David was definitely Herman's brother, though, because the address matches the address in the city directories for the family.

In addition to the search engine, they have an index-by-year that can be browsed, leading to the same entries.

St. Louis Post Dispatch - 1975-1977

An index for these years can be found on Bob Doerr's website. He has been the editor of the Missouri State Genealogical Association Journal since 1992.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Archives 1988-Current

The Post Dispatch website allows you to search obituaries back to 1988, and then it gives you the option of downloading the obituaries directly from the site for $2.95. This searches every word, so you can find entries that mention surnames of children, etc. However, the search engine will not capture every obituary, so it is useful to check the indexes above for those after 1992.

St. Louis Argus Obituaries

"The ST. LOUIS ARGUS serves as a valuable resource for deaths in the local African-American community, especially during the early 20th century, when obituaries or death notices for this segment of the population were generally not carried in major area newspapers."

On an old version of the St. Louis Public Library website they have obituaries from the St. Louis Argus (1915-1919, 1921-1927, 1942-1945)

I suspect over time these will be moved to the same obituary search engine as the Post Dispatch obituaries.

The Westliche Post Obituaries

The St. Louis County Library has an index for The Westliche Post, a German language newspaper

The index currently covers the years 1880-1887, with the indexes for 1881 and 1882 only covering 6 months each.

On the other side of the Mississippi river

Belleville, Illinois Daily Advocate

An index for vital statistics (Adoptions, Births, Baptisms, Marriages, Divorces, Deaths) 1927-1954 at the St. Clair Genealogical Society.

The St. Clair Genealogical Society also has indexes for the Belleville News Democrat (1994-2007), Freeburg Tribune (1904-1939), Lebanon Advertiser (1917-1921), and the Millstadt Enterprise (1897-1949). Scroll down their homepage for links to each of them. There is a site-search box at the bottom of the page, though it doesn't include the Daily Advocate index.

How to Get a Copy of the Obituary

If you do live in St. Louis, you can find the obituary in the newspaper microfilm archives at either the St. Louis County or St. Louis City headquarter libraries. (Only the County library has The Westliche Post on microfilm. Both have the St. Louis Argus, but the County library doesn't appear to have the years 1942-1945.)

You can also request the County library or City library photocopy and mail it to you. The fee is minimal at both places.

For the Illinois newspapers, the Belleville Public Library is the place to go.

Update on St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries

The below information is outdated.
Please follow this link for more recent info.

A month ago I wrote about the St. Louis City Public Library's database and index of the St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries they (and the St. Louis County library) have on microfilm. The staff is hard at work updating their site, as there have been changes in the past month.

Their database now covers 1880-1930, 1942-1945, 1960-1963, and 1992-2001.

In addition to adding 1998-2001 data, they have added an Obituaries by Year index covering the same years. This is on their new website and successfully replaces the index on their old website. For the moment, the old website is the only place to go for the 2002-2006 obituary index, but I expect that to change relatively quickly considering their pace in updating the new site in the past couple months. The old index page also has the World War 1 and World War 2 casualty, MIA and POW lists. At some point I expect those to be transferred to the new website as well.

A month ago I said that the newer indexes weren't as important since the Post Dispatch's archive goes back to 1988, but as I discovered a couple days ago, the Post Dispatch's archive is incomplete.

As I mentioned last month, once you find a particular obituary listing you are seeking, if you do live in St. Louis, you can find the obituary in the microfilm archives at either the St. Louis County or St. Louis City headquarter libraries.

You can also request the County library photocopy and mail it to you. The fee is minimal.

For post-1988 obituaries, if you have a subscription, you can also search on GenealogyBank, NewsBank, or any other source for America's Obituaries' database - and see if the obituary is there. It might save you a library trip.

America's Obituaries - incomplete

So I was visiting a local message board where someone asked for help in looking up an obituary. Being the helpful sort, I checked the St. Louis Post Dispatch indexes, and they were listed, so I knew the exact issues the obituaries appeared in. Since they were recent obituaries (1995 and 2001) and I have a GenealogyBank subscription, I realized I’d be able to make them very happy by sending them the obituaries within a few hours of their asking for them.

But they weren’t on GenealogyBank. I blinked. GB claims they have the Post Dispatch obituaries Jan 1, 1988 to current.

A few quick test searches revealed the issue. GenealogyBank allows you to search by date and state alone, and pull up every obituary they have that appeared on that date in a particular state. Their database isn’t complete.

A search on one date – December 2, 1995 - yielded 10 results in the state of Missouri, and all of them in the Kansas City Star.

The other date – December 5, 2001 – yielded 19 results for the Post Dispatch, but not the obituary I was seeking, and according to the online index, should be there. By 2001 the obituary listings should be over 20 people daily in St. Louis. One week later on Dec 12, there are 72 entries.

It's not GenealogyBank's fault. The source they list for their Post Dispatch obituaries is America’s Obituaries, which is the same one NewsBank uses, so it is the same one I can access for free through the St. Louis County Library’s database, and the same one that the Post Dispatch website’s fee-based Obituary Archive uses. I checked, but unsurprisingly, since they use the same database, these obituaries don’t appear on any of the three sites. I, or another volunteer, will have to look these obituaries up on microfilm.

None of the sites appear to warn the user that the database is incomplete. They all seem to imply that they are complete from January 1, 1988 to current date. This isn't the case.

I suspect this is also true for other newspapers. (For example, I suspect the Kansas City Star had more than 10 death notices on Dec 2, 1995.) So researchers need to know - if a search turns up empty on these databases, that doesn't necessarily mean that no obituary appeared in that newspaper for that person. The particular obituary might just be absent from the database, as the database is incomplete.

No online database should really be assumed complete - as the data is entered by humans, and to err is human. But I think many of us get into a habit of thinking "I searched that database online, so I found all that was there - there's no need to actually look at the microfilm." Sometimes you do.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries

The below information is outdated.
Please follow this link for more recent info.

The St. Louis City Public Library website offers two ways to search indexes of obituaries from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituary Index has annual indexes for 1880-1927, 1942-1945, and 1992-March of 2006. They have stopped updating this page, and it isn't linked to from their main site, so it can only be found via old links to it. (Or new ones like the one I just made.)

There is also the Obituary Search database which currently has data from: 1880-1930, 1942-1945, 1960-1963, and 1992-1997. This doesn't contain the more recent years, however, since the Post Dispatch archives allow you to search back to 1988, that's not a big deal. The older years are more important.

The database now has all the pre-1988 data the old index had, with some additional years. However, there are advantages to the index. The biggest advantage is that it gets indexed by Google, so you don't always need to know about the index in order to find the information. With the index it is also easier to locate misspelled names.

The database has some flexibility.

You can search on fragments of names, so if I enter "New" in the name field, and a year such as 1945, I receive 24 suggestions which include my great uncle Mandell Newmark, but 23 other individuals whose last name begins with "New".

A search on: Mel N (without any year) yields 65 results, including my grandfather Melvin Newmark. However, I can't differentiate between first and last name, and the database limits results to 100, so a search for: 'Ben C' doesn't yield my great grandmother's brother, Ben Cruvant. There are way too many last names beginning with 'Ben' for the database to reach the Cs. A search for "Ben Cr" works though.

---
What do you do once you find the date of the obituary you want?

Post Dispatch Archives

You can purchase the Post Dispatch archived articles for $2.95, and get the text of the obituary that way, or you can write down the date and look them up in the same fashion as below.

St. Louis Public Library Index or Database

If you do live in St. Louis, you can find the obituary in the microfilm archives at either the St. Louis County or St. Louis City headquarter libraries.

You can also request the County library photocopy and mail it to you. The fee is minimal.

Obituaries

A week ago the mother of a good friend passed away. The family didn't want a crowd at the funeral so my friend was quiet for a week. While I would have respected her family's wishes, I would have liked to know. There was an obituary, but I don't read the obituaries daily, so I missed it.

I have heard several of my parents' generation remark that they read the obituaries daily, but I haven't felt the need. I'm realizing I'm now old enough (turning 40 in January) that perhaps I should be too.

I don't subscribe to the local newspaper. I gather my news online. I can read the St. Louis Post Dispatch obituaries online, but that requires me to make a special effort to visit the website daily, and I am sure I would miss days.

There are only two ways I would be certain to see all obituaries in a timely fashion. If they were emailed to me, or if they appeared in my RSS newsreader.

Legacy.com handles the obituaries for many newspapers - including the St. Louis Post Dispatch. They have an email service called ObitMessenger.

For $20 a year you can get every obituary sent to you with a particular surname (up to 5 surnames) across all their newspapers. They call this their Genealogy Package. Though it only sends you an obituary if the surname matches the deceased's. (So you won't get the obituary if it is their maiden name, or the surname of one of the relatives mentioned in the text.)

For $200 a year you can get every obituary with any keyword anywhere in the text (up to 5 keywords, and extremely common words not permitted.) For $15 per year you can get up to 5 keywords for one newspaper. They call these their Custom Keyword Packages.

That's nice, and has its uses. I might consider their Genealogy package for a few of my surnames someday. However, at this moment all I want is every obituary for one newspaper.

Luckily, I discovered on the Post Dispatch website that they do offer an RSS feed. I suspect not every newspaper does. Today I've added another feed to my newsreader, and I won't miss another obituary.

Family History in Newspaper Articles

The topic for the 57th Carnival of Genealogy is:

I read it in the news! Newspapers can be a wonderful source of family history information. Share some aspect about your family history that you learned about in a newspaper. Articles, advertisements, obituaries, classified ads, photos... all are fair game if they appeared in a newspaper.

I've written several times in the past about newspaper items.

I found out about my great grandfather, Melvin Van Every's, Cheese manufactory in Ancestry.com's newspaper databases.

And while I originally found out about my great grandfather, Selig Feinstein's, service to the community in a book, the book cited several newspaper articles that I was able to research on microfilm.

I also found out about my grandfather, Melvin Newmark's, participation in the Veterans of Future Wars at Ancestry.

Newspaper obituaries have provided the greatest advancements in my family tree, helping me to find the names of distant cousins. Such an obituary led me to 100 Dudelsack cousins back in May.

However, a few months ago, I received a copy of the obituaries for my great grandparents, Herman and Anna Feinstein. Here's Herman's:


Most of the information wasn't new. I did learn the name of the Masonic Lodge to which he belonged. However, the obituary was in an unusual location. At the bottom of a death certificate:

This isn't the death certificate I would get if I ordered it from the State of Missouri. It's from the funeral home. I'm pretty sure it is identical, except for the bottom section which contains the notes for the funeral home. Often the Diagram of the Lot, and the location of the burial, this funeral home inserted a newspaper clipping of the obituary along with the name of the Rabbi who officiated over the funeral.

Herman Feinstein died in 1963, so his death certificate won't be available for download from the Missouri State site until 2013. It would cost $13 from the State Vital Records office, and it's not clear they would provide the certificate to a non-immediate family member. The person who sent me copies of the death certificates, obtained from the funeral home likely at a minimal copying fee, was an independent researcher who was completely unrelated.

This is a useful tool to remember when you run across states with heavy restrictions on their copies of the death certificates. If you can find the obituary, it often includes the name of the funeral home.

Finally, a slight digression. The Rabbi who officiated over my great grandfather's funeral: Rabbi Jerome Grollman. He was also the Rabbi who officiated at my Bar Mitzvah back in 1982, and over many family bar mitzvahs, weddings, brises and funerals. A Rabbi at United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis since 1948, he passed away on August 9th at the age of 86. A few quotes from the St. Louis Post Dispatch article:

In 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a guest of Rabbi Grollman and members of the congregation. King had just been released from jail and was exhausted prior to his speech to the congregation. He napped in a chair in Rabbi Grollman's study and then gave a passionate speech. Rabbi Grollman never parted with that chair.

"He was a passionate civil rights advocate, and participated in so many efforts," recalled the rabbi's second cousin, Bernard Lipnick, rabbi emeritus of B'nai Amoona. "He was very courageous and a disciplined person. He took positions that were not popular with all, such as the state of Israel. He expected Israel to act in moral ethical ways; he did not hesitate to criticize the Israeli government."

Every year since I was a toddler, when I've attended High Holy Day services at the synagogue, he would be on the bimah, leading the congregation in prayer. His role has diminished over the years as he was promoted to 'Rabbi Emeritus'. but he has still been there. Last night was the start of Rosh Hashana, and I could feel his absence.

He has been a major part of my family's lives for decades. I learned a lot about him from several newspaper obituaries I wish I had known beforehand. In August I enjoyed talking with my parents about their recollections, as they remember King's speech well.

Unusual Obituaries

One of the non-genealogy newsfeeds I subscribe to is Snopes.com's Urban Legends. So whenever they analyze the claims of a new chain email, I receive it immediately. Of course, the most enjoyable posts are often the ones they announce are true.

As Randy at Geneamusings mentions, the unflattering obituary for Dolores Aguilar is real. Apparently her children weren't very fond of her, and at least one of them was unafraid to say so to the world. I think most of us hope that this isn't the impression we leave on our family. When I read or hear stories like this I realize how lucky I am to belong to the family I do.

Coincidentally, it's the five year anniversary of another obituary that got passed around a lot in emails. An obituary that said memorial gifts should be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office. Alas, there must not have been enough donations.

Also nearly five years ago, in November of 2003, the New York Times found itself issuing a very strange correction