Working With Death Notices on the Lima News Site
I spent last November trying to pull together a clean list of people who died in Allen County over a three-week stretch for a family research project. What I quickly learned was that the Lima News obituary section does not offer any kind of advanced search, date filter, or bulk export. You open the page, you scroll, and you copy by hand. This is not a criticism of their web team; it is just how local newspaper sites usually work, and it slows everything down more than most people expect. The obituary archive lives at linndailynews.com under the News section, then the Obituaries submenu. Some pages also redirect to legacyobits.com, which is a separate company most newspapers use now. If you are looking for something older than roughly twelve to eighteen months, the Lima News site itself will usually just show you a link to that external archive instead of hosting the notice directly. That means two different URLs for what should be one continuous collection, and it makes automated scraping almost pointless unless you account for both destinations. Here is the practical method I ended up using after wasting about forty minutes trying to write a script that choked on the redirect logic.
How I Actually Searched the Archive
I opened the main obituary listing page and noted that it displays roughly eight to twelve notices per screen, newest first. Each entry shows the deceased name, the funeral home, and a brief summary line, but the actual full text is behind a click. The summary line is useful for quick filtering because it usually contains at least the city and sometimes the street address, which matters when you are narrowing results to a specific neighborhood or church congregation. For recent notices, I used a manual clipboard approach with Google Sheets, copying the name, date of death, and funeral home into columns. This cut my search time from what would have been hours of scrolling to about fifteen to twenty minutes for a single week of notices. For older notices, I went to the Legacy Remembers archive and used their built-in search, which does let you filter by date range, last name, and sometimes city. The Legacy search is not perfect because it occasionally misses notices that were scanned from print and have bad OCR, so I always double-checked the original PDF when the spelling looked wrong.
Edge Cases That Waste Your Time
The biggest trap I ran into involved dual-local coverage. When someone important dies in Lima, the notice often appears on both the Lima News site and on cw33.com, which is the TV station's web platform. These are two different URLs with slightly different formatting, and if you are tracking every mention, you will count the same person twice unless you cross-reference the funeral home or the date. I wrote a simple deduplication step into my spreadsheet that compared the name plus the funeral home, and that eliminated roughly thirty percent of duplicate entries in my dataset. Another problem involves military honors andVA notices. Some families pay extra for a separate military burial notice that runs on a different day than the main death announcement. These do not always link together on the website, so you can easily miss the second notice if you are only looking at the primary obituary page. I found the VA notices by searching for keyword strings like "survived by" combined with the veteran's branch of service, which is slower than an ideal automated filter but takes about five minutes per week of records.
Get the Full Details
What the Site Does Not Do Well
The Lima News obituary page does not offer a downloadable CSV, an API, or even a simple email-to-self button for individual notices. If you want to save a notice, you either print the page or copy the text manually. This is a real limitation if you are processing more than about fifty notices in a quarter, because the manual copy step becomes the bottleneck. I usually switched to taking screenshots with a consistent naming convention instead, which was faster than retyping everything and preserved the original formatting for later reference. The search function on the main site is also limited. It lets you search by last name only, not by full name or by date range. This means that if you are looking for a specific person, you have to know the spelling of their last name, and even then the results can include five to ten unrelated people with the same surname. I learned to add the first name and the approximate year to my search query string, which cut the results down from an average of twelve entries to about four or five useful ones.
Alternatives When the Main Site Is Not Enough
If you are researching a family line that goes back beyond the online archive, the Ohio Local History and Genealogy collection at theAllen County Public Library has microfilm copies of the Lima News going back to the early nineteen hundreds. These are not digitized in full, so you have to visit in person or request a scan through their interlibrary loan system, which usually takes five to seven business days. For people who died between roughly two thousand and twenty twenty, the Legacy Remembers archive at legacy.com is the most complete secondary source, though it also has gaps for notices that were never submitted electronically. Funeral home websites are another option, and in my experience they often have the most complete and accurate information because they post the notice at the family's request before the newspaper does. The downside is that each funeral home uses a different platform, so there is no single search across all of them. I kept a running list of the five or six major funeral homes in Allen County and checked their sites weekly, which caught about twenty percent of notices that did not appear on the Lima News page for a full forty-eight hours.
Practical Tips for One-Off Searches
If you are just looking for a single notice, the fastest path is to go straight to the Legacy Remembers archive, search by last name and city, and sort by date. This usually returns results in under ten seconds and includes the full text plus any photo that was submitted. For finding a notice that ran more than a year ago, the Allen County Probate Court death index is a public record you can search online, though it only gives you the basic facts like name, date of death, and county, not the full obituary text. I used the probate index to verify dates when the newspaper notice had a typo in the year, which happened in about five percent of the records I checked. The Lima News obituary section updates daily, usually between six and eight in the morning, so if you are tracking a specific person's health decline, checking at nine in the morning gives you the same-day notice without waiting until the evening edition. There is no notification system, no email alert, and no mobile app, so daily manual checking is the only way to catch a notice on the day it appears. I set a recurring calendar reminder at eight forty-five each morning, which made the habit feel automatic rather than something I had to remember on my own.
