Obituaries
Most of the obituaries below were originally published in the Providence Journal-Enterprise, a Webster County
weekly, during a period from the late 1940's to the early 1960's. The guardian angel who saved
them for our use is Kathleen Bryant of Madisonville in Hopkins County, Kentucky. In Kathleen's own words, here's how it all came about:
And what is the moral of this story, boys and girls? Go immediately to your aunt's basement and rescue those "old, dirty, mouse-eaten, dirt-daubber-caked newspapers!!" What a debt we owe to Kathleen Bryant and her aunt and others like them who save the old things for us. Our sincere thanks go out to all of them.
An every-person index to the obituaries is now available. You can view this file, which has 10,000 to 15,000 names, at the Webster County KYGenWeb Archives. Name of the file is obitindx.txt. There is also a zipped version of the file at the same location.
From time to time we will also be adding a few obituaries from other newspapers as they pertain to Webster Countians. Each obituary will have a line denoting its source. Please send obituaries for your Webster County ancestors if we do not already have them here.
More recently, we have added "1929 Obits....and More", which were contributed by Sheila Penrod from The Twice-a-week Providence Enterprise. Click here to read these obituaries.
We are currently transcribing more obituaries from the 1950's newspapers. These are being posted on the
new
Webster County Message Board
. If you haven't visited it yet, check it out; you can do a county-wide search for your surnames. Click on
the radio button next to "View Message Type" and choose "Obituaries" if you only want to read the obits. There are now over 12,000 obituaries of Webster County interest on the Message Board.
A Big Thank You to both Webster County weeklies for allowing us to place these obituaries online.
Click on the alphabetical group that contains the surname you're looking for.
"I started working on genealogy in 1970. About that time the Hopkins County Genealogical Society was copying the cemeteries of Hopkins County. A fellow member of the society started clipping obituaries from "The Messenger" to keep the cemetery records up-to-date. I realized then how valuable it would be to have copies of the obituaries available. Shortly after that I was visiting my aunt and saw stacks of old newspapers in her attic. Still feeling shy about asking for things, I didn't ask for the papers at that time. But I did mention to another aunt and some cousins how much I'd like to have those old, dirty, mouse-eaten, dirt-daubber-caked newspapers. I can still hear them laughing about my wanting those old papers. Eventually I did ask my aunt for the papers and maybe five years later I finally rescued them and stored them in my basement for perhaps another ten years before I had an opportunity to work on them. I started clipping the obituaries and putting them in a scrapbook and have recently been working on indexing them, which will make them much more useful."
Kathleen allowed the Webster County Library to copy her scrapbooks and that is where I found them about a year ago. I started typing them up for the web page during the summer of 1996 and completed the pages I had copied in April 1997. I am hopeful we'll find more next time we journey to Webster County. To date, though, we have over 1700 obituaries here in their entirety.
