Polish obituaries in Chicago newspapers

[Sovinski]

I recently spent the day in Chicago at the Harold Washington library, looking for obituaries of ancestors in a variety of local newspapers. I came away frustrated, not finding anything. But I also noticed that I wasn't seeing very many Polish surnames at all among the obituaries, let alone those of my ancestors.

Does anyone know the customs employed in the first half of the 20th century regarding the publishing of obituaries? Someone at the Newberry Library suggested that families had to pay the newspaper to get an obit printed...that it wasn't automatic as today. And recent immigrant families either couldn't afford it or simply couldn't negotiate the process involved.

Can anyone shed any more light on this?

Thanks,

Rob Sovinski

[jjczuchra]

Polish immigrants were not always comfortable with English and probably did not subscribe to English language newspapers.  I still recall my grandmother reading the Polish language newspaper back in the 1960s-- and grandma wasn't an immigrant.  So it doesn't surprise me that you didn't find too many Polish named people in the English dailies. 

Even in the Polish dailies, death notices were not as customary as we think.  When Fred Hoffman indexed death notice from the Dziennik Chicagoski in Chicago for 1890-1899, it was printed as a volume about a half inch thick.  And that's giving a rather comprehensive summary in each entry!

For 1900-1919, in two volumes, each about 1 inch thick, we see the number of death notices increasing.  Fred even cut back on the amount of detail summarized.

For 1920-1929, in two volumes, each about 1 inch thick, we see an even greater increase in death notices.  It was at this time that PGSA decided it could not afford to publish any more of the index series because of the large numbers of notices.  That's why I switched to databases.

Why the increase in the number of death notices?  There were certainly more Polish people around.  Families started to spread out geographically (further apart) and maybe didn't have phones yet.  Funeral customs themselves were changing.  For example, in the early 1940s, my grandfather was waked in the family home.  In my lifetime, the wake has always been at a funeral home.  The cost of placing the notice may very well have been a factor as you already noted. When my father died, I couldn't believe how expensive it was to place a death notice in the newspaper.  I had a nice biography written (I was already into genealogy) but pared it down considerably when I found out what the per word charge was.  Some of my relatives (poorer than me) either didn't have the money or saved it by not publishing a death notice when their loved ones died.

[Sovinski]

Thank you for those valuable insights. It's one thing to harvest ancestral data, but it's just as useful to understand the context in which that data was (or was not) recorded. I don't imagine that facilitating our genealogical research was a particularly high priority for our ancestors a hundred years ago. I just wish mine had left just a few more bread crumbs to follow...

[costrowski]

Do you know in which area of the city your ancestors lived? There are some neighborhood newspapers that have a lot of Polish obituaries.

[KMeyer2986]

RE: neighborhood newspapers that may have Polish obits

Is there somewhere we can find a listing of those particular papers you mentioned?  My family lived in Chicago; one obit was found in the Chicagowski but I'd love to look for more, particularly for my great grandfather's obit in 1932 April (James Misklewicz alias James Hoffman)  Their address was on Spaulding Avenue in Chicago, in case you are familiar with the different neighborhood papers.

Thanks!

[Sovinski]

In 1894 my Sowinski ancestors lived at 44 Cornelia Street (now named Walton Street) between Noble St. and Milwaukee Ave. The site of their home is now a parking lot.

[costrowski]

Kmeyer,

Here's a link to the Illinois Newspaper Database.
http://www.library.illinois.edu/inp/database.php

Put in Chicago in the search parameter and you'll get a long list of newspapers and where they can be accessed.

Some of the newspapers were neighborhood newspapers, so in order to determine the appropriate one I'd have to know where your family lived in Chicago (north side or south side). I don't think obituaries were as common in the early 1930's as they became just a few years later, especially for poor immigrants.