Eleven-year-old Edward Hendrickson was killed by a train at the B&O railroad tracks in Philadelphia in 1905.
According to the death certificate, he had been trespassing.
The boy would appear to be a troublemaker. But according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward Hendrickson was a hero.
"(He) sacrificed his life under the wheels of a locomotive to save his 8-year-old brother, Gilbert, from injury yesterday," reads the April 21, 1905, edition.
And that's how a newspaper completes the picture.
Thomas Kemp, director of genealogy for NewsBank, uses the two documents to show how obituaries tell "the rest of the story" for genealogists. Government records, such as birth certificates and censuses, are indispensable but often lack detail.
"(Obituaries) give you a sense of a person's life," Kemp said. "This will fill in the context, the details of their lives."
They are not as accessible as other records, and finding them may require travel, cost or time spent at a microfilm reader. But genealogists say obituaries are well worth the effort because of the color they add to the family history portrait.
What you'll find
Obituaries are one of the best — and at times only — resources for uncovering the identity of ancestors.
That's especially true when asking what became of the kids.
"Obituaries fill that unique niche of being able to tell you where people went, as well as tell you how people are related," said David Rencher, chief genealogical officer for FamilySearch.
Rencher had an ancestor who immigrated to America in 1776. Using old newspapers, he followed the man's descendants from North Carolina to California.
Names and places make obituaries especially valuable.
The "survived by" listings are usually a reservoir of family names — of children, children's spouses and married names of daughters. Obituaries often identify key locations, such as the cemetery where the deceased is buried, areas where he or she lived and places children have relocated to.
In some cases, obituaries are the only resource. Many government records don't list children. Census records are hit-and-miss and only available to the public 72 years after they are taken (the 1940 Census will not be accessible until 2012).
"For the later (relatives) where the census records haven't been released yet, obituaries may be your only clue," Rencher said.
Genealogist Lou Szucs found that obituaries were the best way to learn where an ancestor emigrated from in the "Old Country." Without the newspapers on microfilm at a public library in Brooklyn, N.Y., she may not have found her ancestors in Ireland.
"There's probably not a richer source of information than obituaries," said Szucs, now an editor for Ancestry.com.
Obituaries can provide precious details about occupations, marriages, religious affiliation, military service, fun facts and family lore. Mormon obituaries will often detail offices or callings held in the church.
"In some respects it's almost a life story," said Paul Smart, a certified genealogist and popular lecturer. "It may provide information that nobody on the earth could give you about the person's life."
The information, however, must be scrutinized and verified with other documents whenever possible. Obituaries are written from memory and may be subject to human error and bias. Genealogists have seen incorrect birth and death dates, or names purposefully excluded because of a family falling out. Smart is aware of an instance where an obituary was written and published without the person having died.
"You gather evidence and you put it together much like you would a court case," Smart said. "You can't always assume that the information in that obit is totally accurate."
What's out there
A searchable database of newspapers can be a researcher's best friend, Smart says.
But like good friends, indexed collections are hard to find.
"If it's not indexed, you read lots of old newspapers and maybe you hit that treasure and find what you want," Smart said.
Finding an obituary may require more time and resources than a government record. Old newspapers are almost always available on microfilm through public libraries, genealogical societies and facilities like the Family History Library and Church History Library in Salt Lake City. But that involves scrolling through rolls of film and may require travel to the towns and cities a particular newspaper calls home.
The problem, according to Rencher, is that newspaper collections are "massive." The LDS Church's Family History Department once tried to collect newspapers from around the country on microfilm, but the effort was short-lived.
"We soon figured out that they were so voluminous that they were going to take over our microfilm space," Rencher said.
While the undertaking of putting old newspapers online is tremendous, it is well under way.
"I think the community has finally woken up to the fact that the nation's newspapers are a historic treasure," Rencher said. "Digitization of newspapers is finally beginning to take off."
The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint effort between the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Library of Congress and state entities, has made newspapers from 15 states and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1922 available online. The University of Utah and BYU are digitizing Utah newspapers as part of the project.
More complete databases can be found on commercial subscription sites.
GenealogyBank, a division of NewsBank, has 4,300 U.S. newspapers in its database covering all 50 states and ranging from 1690 to present time. Ancestry.com features a U.S. obituary collection and several smaller collections of local newspapers.
As digitization moves forward, more answers will be readily available. Szucs says there are "millions and millions" of obituaries being preserved in genealogical societies throughout the country.
"When they all come online, we're all going to be dancing around, because a lot of mysteries will be solved through obituaries."