Fort Wayne and Allen County, Indiana Area Obituary Index, 1841 - November 2012, August 20, 2013 to November 24, 2013
This obituary index covers obituaries recorded in Fort Wayne, Indiana newspapers between 1841 and October 2012. There are more than 581,000 records in this database. The index is in two parts and represents two totally different works.
PART ONE:
The first part of the index covers 1841 to 1899. This part was completed and originally printed in book form a number of years ago. In the publishing of the original book index, an unfortunate circumstance caused the names of the newspapers and the page citations to become disassociated with the names. Hence, in searching this index one is able to find the name of the person who appeared in an area newspaper, the date of the paper, and an abstract of the obituary.
PART TWO:
The second part of the index covers some 1900 dates through November 2012 and August 20, 2013 to November 24, 2013. The Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center staff and volunteers compiled the searchable data file.
Periodic updates will be made to this site over the next year as staff work to index the newspapers missed over this 168 year period. This part will also be updated with more current obituaries as those data files are created.
In the early years of the 21st century, volunteers from the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Susan Downey, Dick Florea, and Margery Graham, re-read the Fort Wayne area newspapers for the first decade of the 20th century. They recovered more than seven thousand obituaries that were missed in the original indexing. Those entries are included in this database.
Researchers can find microfilm of all of the Fort Wayne newspapers in the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center.
Searching
This database may be searched in the following ways:
- Fuzzy -- will search for that string of characters. Searching for Smith would find Smith, Smithson, Arrowsmith, etc.
- Exact -- will search only for that exact text. Searching for Smith will find only Smith.
- Soundex -- will search for the Soundex equivalent. Searching for Smith will find Smith, Smythe, Schmidt, etc.