Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society
Researching Warren County and beyond! We are a FamilySearch Affiliate Library!
Obituaries
The following buttons link to ALPHABETICAL index files for some of the obituaries kept in the files of the Warren County Genealogical Society. As more obituaries are indexed and the file updated, they will be included here. The link to the PDF includes the date the index was last updated.
These lists are searchable by using <CTRL+F> if using a Microsoft Windows-based operating system.
If you find your ancestor listed, you can visit the library and look up the obituary yourself or submit an Obituary Request.
To access obituaries indexed alphabetically BY YEAR, please visit our old website by clicking the button below.
PLEASE HELP!
We are actively working to expand our collection of obituaries and need your help. If you have a Warren County obituary that is not in our index, please share a copy with us. You can mail them to us at the address at the bottom of this webpage or you can email a scanned image of the obituary as a JPG file. Please identify the name and date of the newspaper that it came from if you have that information.
Although obituaries, death notices, funeral cards and similar items are typically considered a secondary source for most genealogical information, they nonetheless provide valuable clues that help to locate vital records and burial information for the deceased plus they can provide kinship information regarding parents, spouse, children and other family members. Often they will provide a biographical sketch of the deceased and give hints as to where other family members are living. Since births and death records were not systematically recorded in Ohio until 1867, early obituaries may be the only remaining source for some information regarding the deceased.
Because of their value, WCGS has been collecting obituaries that relate to Warren County for many years. Initially this "clipping collection" was primarily from the Western Star newspaper. We have, however, steadily expanded the scope to include other Warren County newspapers and continue to do so. The obituaries have been catalogued by years in binders located in the WCGS Resource Library in Lebanon, Ohio. Each year has a separate name index.
Currently all Western Star and Lebanon Gazette microfilms available to us have been checked. Society volunteers continue to add to the collection with new obituaries and by searching additional microfilms of older newspapers. We are currently working through Miami Gazette microfilms. This has been completed through 1916 and is continuing. We also add other obituaries donated to the Society as they are received and hope you will mail us a copy of anything you may have that are not already listed here.
Warren County, Ohio, Obituary Index (2012 Edition)
This tenth edition compiled by Arne Trelvik, lists 91,635 obituaries dating from 1810 to 2012. Each entry provides name of deceased, year of death, and page reference where the obituary may be located in our collection. The index includes 9,361 obituaries from the 19th century. It is available from the Warren County Genealogical Society for $25. Each entry contains the name of the deceased followed by the year they died and the page number in our binder where the obituary can be found. All obituaries can be viewed in our Resource Library in person. Please use the Obituary Request form if you cannot visit our Resource Library in person. Please see the Research Services page for more details.
Please note the following:
1. The quantity and quality of information in a particular obituary can vary greatly. Some go on for multiple columns while others may only contain a line or two and not give much more than the deceased name and the death date.
2. Although every effort has been made to eliminate duplicates, with a project this size, that can sometimes be difficult and we do not guarantee that some duplication has not crept into the collection.
3. Image quality of some of the older microfilms is very poor.
4. 1850-1861 Miami-Visitor Death Notices and Obituaries - We no longer stock Karen Campbell's book of this title, but all of the obituaries in that book are also in our regular obituary index.