Obit Reader Helps Historians And Genealogists

By: You could call him the king of obituaries. Larry Thurman, 67, is working his way through more than a century of Galesburg newspapers on microfilm from his throne in the far east corner of the Galesburg Public Library.

The retired factory worker and avid genealogist is not interested in crime or politics or weather reports from days past. He only has eyes for obituaries and death notices, which he is compiling into indexes to aid other genealogists and researchers.

Thurman's life revolves around newspapers and deaths. His days begin at 2 a.m., when he gets up to deliver the (Peoria) Journal Star to subscribers. He often takes a quick nap before heading to the library around 9 a.m., when he settles in at the microfilm machine for hours of scrolling through old newspapers. For about 30 hours a week, he logs obituaries by hand with a ball point pen on lined notebook paper in a black three-ring binder.

He records the name of the deceased, the date of death, the date of the obituary and the page of the newspaper on which it was published; all to create an index that will help others find obituaries with more ease.

When Thurman gets through a month's worth of obituaries, he enters the data into a spreadsheet on his home computer. When he gets a year's worth, he formats and prints the spreadsheets.

Copies of his work go to the Knox County Genealogical Society holdings and copies also go to the Galesburg Public Library, where the staff sends them out to be bound in thin black books.

Since starting this project several years ago, Thurman has compiled indexes for obituaries published in The Register-Mail from 1943 to 1969. The library has indexed the information as well as other vital records including births and marriages since 1970 and now has the last three years' worth of records available on its Web site.

Thurman now is working backward from 1942 at a rate of about a month's worth of obituaries every five days, hoping to index local obituaries all the way back to 1849.

"I feel like I'm helping people out somewhere down the line," Thurman said. "Hopefully someone will get a lot of good use out of what I'm doing."

Thurman never married and has no children. But he is close with his siblings and their families and enjoys being able to share the family's history with them.

His interest in genealogy was piqued decades ago, when he was working full-time at Maytag. His cousin's wife inquired about the family's history and Thurman decided to figure it all out. "She wanted to know a bit of the family history," Thurman said. "I didn't know that much about it then."

He became involved with the Knox County Genealogical Society, using its resources and those available in libraries in Illinois, Ohio, Connecticut, Maryland and Oregon to trace his ancestry back to the 1400s.

Though his work at the library can be tedious, Thurman said he keeps going because it's a valuable resource for the library and the genealogical society to offer patrons. Indexes such as the ones he is creating will save researchers and librarians a lot of time. Rather than scrolling through the microfilm themselves, they can search the yearly indexes by name or date and find the exact date and page the obituary was published.