Back to Obituaries
Before the year 2000, there were not many internet postings for obituaries. Well there wasn’t much of any internet at all. There was the newspaper, though, and at least for us, the Advertiser Tribune is available on microfiche.
When I was in Tiffin for the 2021 Class Reunion, I spent the Friday morning at the
Tiffin Public Library researching microfiche of the Advertiser Tribune. I
gathered some jpgs of newspaper articles and those are included in news links
on the obituaries page (slide or scroll to the right: see Jim Roe, Charles Ward,
etc).
But some of these jpgs did not come out to well. They could be improved and other research could be done to fill in the gaps of others that we have no record of.
I knew that this service was available, but was not exactly sure as to how to use it. I went in and kindly asked one of the attendants at the front desk How to the service and she/he gave me an in-depth overview of the process. I was shown where the microfiche were located, how to reference an index of tapes available, how to load the microfiche, and most importantly, how to zoom in and resolve an article and then make a photo that could be sent to my phone or email account.
So you can do this too. It can be a rather enjoyable experience. At least I found it was. If you do help out, here are a few tips:
Make a record of the microfiche that you recorded the information on. Include the date, section, column of the article. This might help further improvements down the road, lest the resolution not be good and it needs to improve. Because when you take that jpeg at the library, you will not know until later when you view it on a laptop or computer, that the resolution really looks good. (I failed to do this when I made my recordings).
Keep focused, but enjoy at the same time. You might be tempted to see how the Indians were doing that day. You will definitely find out that today’s paper is an absolute ghost of what it once was.
Be prepared to cry. I got rather emotional when I was reading the articles about past friends and classmates. It was hard to do, to go from one terrible story to another. Eventually, I got through.